The folk artist Joni Mitchell had to be better than to earn her first proper guitar
You don’t become one of music’s greatest storytellers overnight. Like most things great, there is the 10,000 hours of input before mastering it and I don’t just mean sitting in your bedroom churning out songs. While Joni Mitchell may have made her fingers bleed with hour after hour of guitar practice, it’s the many lives she has lived that allow her songs to be packed with such wisdom.
Whether it was treading barefoot through the hills of Laurel Canyon or travelling along the sunkissed coast of Greece, Joni Mitchell’s songs often tell a very true account of real chapters from her life. Woven into universal tales of human emotion, we hear stories of characters and locations that have taught her the ways of the world.
Mitchell regularly played the role of weary traveller as a means of artistic cultivation. But before it was done across all four corners of the globe, Mitchell beat the paths of more domestic soil to better understand herself as an artist.
Her 1968 debut album, Song to a Seagull, introduced the world to a profoundly poetic writer who mused on the lyrical preoccupations that would become a signature of her later work: Freedom, love, and California.
It was packed with the sort of observational wisdom we’d become accustomed to from Mitchell, and with her formative musical experiences being one of extensive travel, it’s easy to see why. In the years leading up to Song to a Seagull, she bounced between East American cities, soaking up the newly thriving folk scene with her husband and musical collaborator, Chuck.
But while the Greenwich Folk Revival was bleeding into the rest of North East America, platforming cafe artists week on week, Mitchell decided to head South in a bid to engage with people outside her realm of comfort: “We got out of Michigan and went down to the Carolinas” she told Dave Wilson in a 1968 interview. “And found out that South Carolina was too far south. I refused to work there any more. North Carolina was very nice; we met a lot of interesting people, very nice service people, which gave me a whole new point of view on the war. I know a lot of really nice, a lot of really tragic, and a lot of really gung-ho soldiers”.
Outside the smoke-filled rooms of North America’s thriving folk scenes were the everyday people whose lives made up the social landscape upon which Mitchell would so poignantly address in her music and her early voyage to America’s southern states is undoubtedly a formative chapter in her artist career. But her time in North Carolina provided her with more than a catalogue of songs, it provided her something with which she could write them on: “A captain who owned my guitar before me wanted to give it to me because he thought I was better than Peter, Paul and Mary. He used to come in every night and get drunk and say, “Oh, you are better than Peter, Paul and Mary.” So I bought the guitar from him at a very, very, very good price. Love it dearly.”
