The guitar that changed Joni Mitchell forever: “In the Athens underground”
In the broader context of Joni Mitchell’s legacy, we talk a lot about her prowess as a world-class songwriter, and for good reason. It’s often easy to forget that there were a few instruments that shaped her sound, too.
Before Mitchell started writing with the guitar, she was well-versed in the art of classical piano. Around the same time, she loved painting and writing poetry, all facets that would become staples of her artistic vision. When she finally picked up a guitar, she didn’t take to it as easily as others, mainly because of the weakness in her left hand caused by contracting polio as a teenager.
Mitchell’s extensive tunings are considered legendary now, but back then, they were a means of sustainability and changing the instrument to suit her needs. It even sounds innovative and revolutionary put like that, but Mitchell truly couldn’t press down on the strings as much as she needed to, so she adjusted it to make things easier.
At first, she built the “repertoire of the open major tunings” around what “the old black blues guys came up with”, she explained in 1996. She also said that it was only three or four tunings, with the simplest one being the one that Neil Young uses a lot, as well as “open G with the fifth string removed, which is what Keith Richards plays in.” From there, she started to get into the more “modern chords”.
What she did after that is more interesting – she started using her painting abilities as guidance, using colours to discover different tunings. As she put it, “Pure majors are like major colours; they evoke pure well-being. Anybody’s life at this time has pure majors in it, given, but there’s an element of tragedy. No matter what your disposition is, we are air breathers, and the rain forests coming down at the rate they are…there’s just so much insanity afoot.”
In 1969, Mitchell bought her first dulcimer at the Big Sur Folk Festival. Mostly, it started as another means to an end – something that made playing easier. But ultimately, it ended up shaping the entire sound of her magnum opus, Blue. “I was craving a guitar so badly in Greece,” Mitchell explained. “The junta had repressed the population at that time. They were not allowed public meetings; they were not allowed any kind of boisterous or colourful expression.”
She went on, “The military was sitting on their souls, and even the poets had to move around. We found this floating poets’ gathering place, and there was an apple crate of a guitar there that people played. I bought it off them for 50 bucks and sat in the Athens underground and, you know, the underbelly running around—and it was like a romance. It was a terrible guitar, but I hadn’t played one for so long, and I began slapping it because I had been slapping this dulcimer. That’s when I noticed that my style had changed.”
Mitchell thought it was a unique habit she’d developed until she saw Stephen Stills playing it the same way during a Crosby, Nash, and Stills performance on TV. By which point, she used him as guidance to develop her craft, observing the way that he did it so that she could do it the same way. In many ways, that’s how Mitchell developed many aspects of her songwriting – by, in her words, “admiration and not by intellect”.
And today, Blue still stands as one of the most significant records ever created, and a real, living embodiment of the value of lasting cultural impact. Her sound and style of writing not only changed the folk game but also inspired an entire generation of songwriters to adopt her specific flavour of confessional writing, searching for greater levels of authenticity to improve their own artistic expression.
