Joni Mitchell on the “great gift” of Billie Holiday
Folk singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell has had a mammoth impact on the music industry that succeeded her. Mitchell’s music is characterised by its life, packed to the brim with beautiful melodies and poetic lyricism. This pairing of vulnerable words with guitar and piano soundscapes has influenced countless artists in the years since her breakthrough, from Björk to Bob Dylan.
While she was flitting between folk, jazz, and pop, collecting ten Grammys along the way, Mitchell secured her place as one of the most important women in the history of music. Her influence is expansive and still ongoing, but Mitchell herself was inspired by the previous generation of women in music.
Mitchell has previously shared her musical motivations, particularly noting the influence of jazz and, namely, the great Billie Holiday. Long before Mitchell pioneered the folk movement of the 1950s and 1960s, Holiday spent the preceding decades enjoying success in jazz music. Like Mitchell, she exhibited an extraordinary mixing of vulnerability and melody alongside distinctive vocals.
Mitchell once picked out her favourite artists for Artist’s Choice: Joni Mitchell – Music That Matters To Her, in which she shared her love for the jazz singer, who she deemed as having a “great gift”. She named ‘Solitude’ as her song of choice, a jazz standard first composed by Duke Ellington. Holiday recorded the song throughout the 1940s and 1950s.
Holiday’s recording is a beautifully understated and iconic jazz song with piano and horns. Her controlled vocals almost contrast the song’s themes of desperate longing and melancholic loneliness as she laments, “In my solitude you haunt me, with reveries of days gone by, in my solitude you taunt me, with memories that never die”. It’s the kind of honest but calm vulnerability that you can feel in Mitchell’s own catalogue.
Mitchell gushed over Holiday, stating: “I love Billie Holiday – all phases of her. No one I know could express hurt and loss with such a good-hearted tone – not a trace of self-pity or melodrama in it.” On ‘Solitude’ in particular, her vocals are at once expressive and composed, avoiding excess in favour of intimacy and warmth.
The folk singer-songwriter suggests that this element of her music was her “great gift”, detailing: “And with it, she could make all those beautiful melodic ‘doormat’ sound (written by men for women to song) sound wise. Billie’s voice here is pristine, and again I am delighted by the horn arrangement.”
It’s a pristine jazz song which demonstrates Holiday’s talent as well as her influence on Mitchell. Though Mitchell came to fame through folk, she would eventually turn to jazz in her own music, collaborating with the likes of Charles Mingus and Wayne Shorter in the 1970s. But even in her folkier output, the vulnerable intimacy of Holiday’s influence can be felt.
