The 1960s singer Joni Mitchell could never enjoy: “I didn’t care”
Joni Mitchell was usually the last person to concern herself with whether or not her songs got on the radio.
She wanted to test the boundaries of what she could do on every one of her records, and she was never going to get there by trying to chase trends every time she made a new album. Her biggest breakthroughs had to be based on music rather than popularity, and that meant knowing which artists to be inspired by and which ones weren’t worth investing that much time in.
And that even included some of the biggest names in rock and roll as well. Mitchell knew that Leonard Cohen wasn’t doing anything that some of the greatest poets before him hadn’t already done, and even when she was looking at some of the biggest names in jazz, she wasn’t all that invested in John Coltrane as she was in Charles Mingus when she put some of her best records together.
In fact, a lot of the biggest names in her record collection were the ones that were known for taking chances. Steely Dan was one of the most forward-looking bands that she had ever heard around that time, and compared to the more obscure records that people considered classic back in the day, not many of her folk-rock contemporaries would have been listening to people like Rachmaninoff in their spare time.
But the reality is that Mitchell was the last person to consider herself a folkie. Her music had a lot more to say than just one person with an acoustic guitar, and when looking through her back catalogue, there are plenty of times where she has broken away from the folk tradition altogether to say what she wanted.
Because when you think about it, saying someone is only a folk artist is really limiting to them. There’s no real room for them to grow outside of having a couple of decent tunes, and since Mitchell knew the ins and outs of music theory better than most, she felt that she needed to reflect that in her songs, and that meant shunning what people like Joan Baez were doing around that same time.
Everyone else would have agreed that Baez had the perfect voice for what she was trying to do, but Mitchell was willing to say that she wasn’t all that enamoured with what she was doing, saying, “When I first started out, I imitated a girl named Shelby Flint, as a novice singer. And then a little Joan Baez influence, but I don’t care for Joan Baez. She’s got a cold tone. She’s chilly. She’s not a soulful singer. I tend to like black singers. As a singer, I learned more from Miles Davis than I learned from anybody.”
To her credit, Mitchell was a much different voice than Baez during her prime, but that doesn’t mean that either of them was terrible at what they did. There was a smokiness to the way that Baez sang a lot of her songs, and even if she didn’t have the same kind of soulfulness as someone like Nina Simone, that didn’t make her any less of a legend when she was singing alongside Bob Dylan or coming out with her own legendary tracks like ‘Diamonds and Rust’.
Both styles of singing had their right to exist in the public consciousness, but Mitchell often needed a little bit more to get her invested in someone’s singing. Baez had a lot of expression in the way that she sang, but for Mitchell, the best singers needed to have a little bit more attitude behind their music every time they opened their mouth.
