Joni Mitchell

Roberta Joan Mitchell, born Roberta Joan Anderson and known as Joni Mitchell (Fort Macleod, Alberta, 1943), is a Canadian and American singer-songwriter and painter. One of the most influential figures to emerge from the 1960s folk circuit, she built a body of work that grew to take in pop, jazz and rock. Her painting is less widely known but central to her sense of herself: she often describes herself as a "painter derailed by circumstance".

She began singing in small nightclubs in Saskatoon and across western Canada before moving on to the clubs of Toronto. From an early age she combined an interest in painting with learning the piano, ukulele and guitar. After contracting polio as a child, she weakened her left hand and devised alternative guitar tunings to compensate, and those tunings shaped her songwriting ever after. She moved to the United States in 1965 and began touring. Some of her early songs were first recorded by other singers, which helped her sign with Reprise Records and release her debut album, Song to a Seagull, in 1968.

Her breakthrough came with Blue (1971), a deeply personal record often cited as one of the greatest albums ever made. That same period produced "Big Yellow Taxi" and "Woodstock", the latter written after she had cancelled her own appearance at the festival, a decision she later regretted. Court and Spark (1974), which included "Help Me", became her best-selling album.

From the mid-1970s her music moved closer to jazz. She worked with musicians including Jaco Pastorius, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock and Charles Mingus, and her compositions grew harmonically and rhythmically complex as she blended jazz with rock, R&B, classical music and non-Western rhythms. Her voice, which shifted from mezzo-soprano to a wide-ranging contralto, is among her most recognisable features.

Mitchell produced or co-produced most of her albums and designed most of her own covers, a visual practice that runs alongside her music. A critic of the music industry, she stopped touring and released her last album of original songs in 2007. After a brain aneurysm in 2015 she recovered over a long period, returned to public life in 2021 when she received a Kennedy Center Honor, and performed at the Newport Folk Festival in 2022.

Her legacy is twofold. She has eleven Grammy Awards and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997, and many critics regard her as one of the great songwriters of the late twentieth century. Her visual work, meanwhile, shows song and painting as parts of one artistic language.