How Joni Mitchell changed music

By David Bennun

These days, Joni Mitchell’s appearances in the news are more often prompted by her opinions (rebarbative) or her health (erratic) than her music. But after her hospitalisation in Los Angeles last week, her fans had reason to wonder if they were about to lose her, which inevitably concentrated minds on her career. “Folk legend” was the phrase frequently invoked in coverage of the story, alongside an emphasis on her lasting impact upon women performers. It’s not exactly damning her with faint praise, but it does misrepresent and undervalue her.

To call Joni Mitchell undervalued is, on the face of it, an obvious nonsense. No one questions her greatness. Her seat atop Parnassus is assured. It’s more a matter of what she’s valued for. Mitchell’s most enduringly popular work is found on the series of albums she recorded between 1969 and 1974: “Clouds”, “Ladies of the Canyon”, “Blue”, “For the Roses” and “Court and Spark”. Play chronologically through the best-remembered songs from those records and you’ll hear a bright, slightly mannered but evidently special folk artist, sometimes keeping only just the right side of the line between the charming and the twee, as she develops an astonishing depth and range, both musical and emotional. Soon the songs unhook themselves from their skeletons. They flip and they fly. Her voice takes on an acrobatic naturalism, suddenly leaping with unfettered joy or folding itself back into marvellous and unlikely shapes. Of all the 1960s folk artists who remained within that idiom, only Bert Jansch, with his wild, eerie, intense music and flying finger-picking style, did anything like as much to stretch its limits.