Listen to the earliest known recording of Joni Mitchell
Trawling through the annals of pop culture, it is unlikely you’ll ever find a songwriter as brutally honest as Joni Mitchell. Her known talent for confessional penmanship has seen the Canadian artist craft songs that both enrich the very essence of our souls and shake the foundation of society. Her position as one of the world’s finest lyricists and musical performers is no longer up for debate.
With such an esteemed career already in the tank and Mitchell now in the eighth decade of her life, it is truly inspirational to listen back to her first steps towards her current status as a musical icon. While her debut, Song to a Seagull, in 1968 came out after Mitchell had already found fame writing songs for the likes of Judy Collins, it offered most of the audience the first real taste of Mitchell in the studio.
At least, that’s what the world thought until Barry Bowman, a retired radio DJ, finally found the tape he’d been looking for. His daughter had discovered the lost tape in his ex-wife’s basement in 2015, giving the former disc jockey the five-decade-old tape with gleeful resonance. The artist captured was one of Bowman’s old friends who had recorded an audition tape for the Saskatoon-based DJ in 1963. Of course, that artist was none other than Joni Anderson.
Recorded two years before she married Chuck Mitchell and took his name for her won stage name, the tape in question sees a young Joni deliver a powerful rendition of ‘House of the Rising Sun’ and projects the image of a songwriter in the very beginning of her career.
Recorded a year before The Animals would make the song famous in 1964, its lyrics tell a tale of woe and regret, set in a New Orleans brothel. The evocative guitar riff and, later, Eric Burdon’s soulful vocals make it a timeless piece, resonating across generations. However, had this far more tender version reached the airwaves before Burdon and the band, things may have looked very different for both acts.
The tapes are particularly special for the time of the recording. Capturing an artist in such an embryonic stage is always fascinating. However, these tapes hold more value thanks to Mitchell’s commanding iconography. It took Bowman several years to be able to get the tapes out of his storage facility and into the public domain — chasing permission for some time to share them. However, now they’re included in Joni Mitchell’s recently released archival project.
Below, you can hear the digitised copy of Bowman’s tapes of a pre-fame Joni Mitchell or, alternatively, find Bowman discussing and playing his dearly beloved reel-to-reel.
