Joni Mitchell didn’t want to be remembered for folk: “They want to pigeonhole me and they can’t”
I don’t really think that Joni Mitchell is the kind who cared about legacy when she first started.
She might be one of the greatest songwriters of her generation today, but when looking through a lot of her greatest work, many of her songs were about discovering different pieces of harmony that she didn’t realise any rock and roll singer had touched on before. And while she had a lot of different facets to her sound throughout her career, she was never the kind of musician who wanted to be put in a box every single time she performed.
Because, really, Mitchell’s music defies explanation a lot of the time. Some of her greatest tunes don’t have to necessarily follow the same kind of harmony that everyone else does, and even when listening to records like Court and Spark, some of her more commercial songs like ‘Help Me’ are still much more beautiful than any other rock and roll singer could have hoped to be around that time.
Even legends like David Crosby and Neil Young were admitting that she was leagues better than them, but once Mitchell had had enough of one genre, she was bound to move on to something else. Not everything managed to stand the test of time, but while records like Dog Eat Dog aren’t exactly looked back on as classics in the same way that Blue is, that doesn’t give it any less of a right to exist compared to some of her more celebrated songs.
And while a lot of the biggest records she had featured her on acoustic guitar, working on records like Hejira was where she truly started to get outside of her comfort zone. No one else in her field would have dared to try and make a fusion album, but when working alongside her favourite jazz players, she was more than capable of finding different avenues with her sound, especially when she teamed up with Charles Mingus on the Mingus album.
Most people tend to stay in the accomplished world of jazz musicians for the rest of their lives, but even when she worked on the alternate version of ‘Both Sides Now’, Mitchell seemed like an entirely different artist. Her music had grown a lot since the day of her being one of the members of the folk-rock scene, and while she was proud of her songs back then, she didn’t want to live out that persona for the rest of her life.
She had been one of the greatest folk artists of her time for only a few years, and she knew that it was better to move on than be caught in one genre, saying, “It’s ridiculous to call me a folk singer. I’m a composer. What do I have to do to change this? They want to pigeonhole me and they can’t, so they do anyway – ‘folk singer.’ I haven’t been a folk singer since 1965. That’s when I stopped singing ‘folk songs.’” And when you look at where she’s been, calling her a folk singer doesn’t really seem fair.
There are so many other facets to her music that to categorise her in one genre doesn’t seem to fit well. She was one of the finest melody writers of her time, and when you look at her track record for writing tunes, a lot of her songs feel less like pop ditties and more like tone poems that happen to have some of the greatest tunes on Earth over top of them whenever she opens her mouth to sing.
Many folk singers that are working today wouldn’t be here without her music, but to say that she was nothing but the queen of folk music is like saying that Patti Smith’s only contribution to society was being the queen of punk rock. Both of them have some truth to it, but if you’re looking at them strictly through that lens, you’re probably never going to understand the real depth behind their work.
