The singer the greatest country voice, according to Joni Mitchell
Joni Mitchell wasn’t usually looking for the best musicians in the world whenever putting together a record.
The key to making a fantastic album is to use every single musician like a different colour to create a sonic masterpiece, and while Mitchell could captivate an audience herself, it was better to have a musician to feed off of whenever she got to work on one of her records. Not everything had to be perfect, but she typically liked to surround herself with people who excelled in their field.
Because, really, how the hell are you supposed to go back to using a bog-standard bass player when you’ve worked with Jaco Pastorius? The man was one of the leading forces on the bass, and even if he wasn’t one of the most commercial musicians of all time, you wouldn’t be able to find more tasteful playing unless you actually managed to find a bass that was descended from the musical heavens.
But one of the best features that Mitchell could find for a song was always her voice. She poured her heart and soul into every word she sang, and even if she didn’t have to experience every single one of her heartaches again and again whenever she sang, the important part was to make the audience feel the same way that she did when she was writing the songs off of records like Court and Spark.
When she began using other voices, though, she wanted to make sure that everyone could bring their own sonic weight to everything. She had already been working with people like Charles Mingus, who had the best voice on his instrument, but when working on some of her later records, she felt her song ‘Cool Water’ needed the same kind of rustic tone that only Willie Nelson could provide.
Country music wasn’t all that far away from the folk music that she started out with, but Mitchell felt that Nelson had the perfect cadence for the country classic, saying, “[He was] perfect for that song. That was a swing country era. Willie is of that era, and he’s got that same kind of beautiful voice. He also sounds like an old desert rat, which is theatrically appropriate for that song.” But it wasn’t a case of getting Nelson in there to give her a sense of credibility by any stretch.
She wanted the chance to make the best record that she could, and sometimes getting the right sound means passing the mic to someone else. And given how many times Nelson has sung songs like this, it would have been a missed opportunity to use anyone else when Mitchell started scouting for other country stars.
Johnny Cash could have easily done justice to the song, but whereas his baritone was a lot more forceful, Nelson has been singing this style so long that it’s almost baked into his voice half the time. Like his guitar playing, his voice is one of the smoothest things that country music has ever produced, and even on an album that was full of easy-listening songs, to have someone like that give a little respite from everything else was a breath of fresh air.
Mitchell didn’t want to worry about making a record that was going to get in the charts, and when she was working with her favourite artists, it was still about trying to make the kind of record that she wanted to hear. There was no chance that the higher-ups were going to put this next to the likes of Madonna, but this is where everyone went when they wanted something with a bit more depth.
