The singer Joni Mitchell always knew was out of everybody’s league: “This was her great gift”
“Always an angel, never a god,” Boygenius sang, the band made up of Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus, succinctly commenting that the acts considered god tier remains a boys club that women are so rarely afforded entry to. However, one woman undeniably broke through the glass ceiling, and that’s Joni Mitchell.
While conversation surrounding the best musicians of all time predominantly brings up the same male figures like Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix and Leonard Cohen, Mitchell has commanded so much respect that her name rightfully appears alongside them.
To the men on the list, they would have argued that Mitchell should come first, with Cohen once declaring, “Joni was some kind of musical monster, that her gift somehow put her in another category from the other folksingers,” adding, “There was a certain ferocity associated with her gift. She was like a storm.”
Dylan agreed, stating, “Joni Mitchell had an album out called Blue,” recounting the impact the record had, “It affected me. I couldn’t get it out of my head. It just stayed in my head”.
In response, though, Mitchell found that male artists came to let her down, wherein she ended up disappointed in the worlds of both Dylan and Cohen, saying of the former, “Bob is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception”.
In the grand scheme of god-like artists, though, one never disappointed her, and truly could never be beaten. While the music world is still so male-dominated, it was always going to be a woman who won in Mitchell’s eyes, as she truly believes no one could ever compare to Billie Holiday.
“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,” she said. Deeply inspiring her own emotive works that are handled with the same delicate balance of grandeur and nonchalance, she added, “This was her great gift, and with it, she could make all those beautiful melodic ‘doormat’ [written by men for women to sing] sound wise.”
To her, Holiday was a true musical god, taking the work of men and making it into something else entirely, infusing the bare bones of a song with life. Just as how Mitchell herself worked a career most commonly surrounded by men in the folk scene, whether it be working with David Crosby on her debut or later touring with Dylan, Holiday was similarly outnumbered, but in the former’s eyes, she was never beaten; she wasn’t even in their league.
As a huge jazz fan, Holiday was one of the many vital inspirations that led Mitchell into that world, but when it came to singing, or even simply conveying emotion in the genre, there was only ever one leader in her eyes, and it wasn’t any of the men.
