Why did the songwriter behind "Blue" go through
her own blue period? And how has a mystery ailment kept one of
the greatest musicians of the last century from the stage? Keep watching to learn tragic details about
Joni Mitchell. Born Roberta Joan Anderson on November 7,
1943, in the tiny town of Fort Macleod in Alberta, Canada, Joni Mitchell faced one of
the greatest challenges of her life at an early age. At age nine, Mitchell contracted polio and
was hospitalized during an outbreak. Initially bedridden, a recovering Mitchell
discovered her love of entertaining while singing for convalescing patients. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Mitchell
opened up about how the disease led to her becoming a performer. "I was nine, and they put me in a polio ward
over Christmas. They said I might not walk again and that
I would not be able to go home for Christmas." However, no one was going to dampen young
Joni Mitchell's holiday cheer. "So I started to sing Christmas carols, and
I used to sing them real loud. When the nurse came into the room I would
sing louder. [...] And I discovered I was a ham." Ironically, Mitchell's bout with the crippling
illness would influence her music in unforeseen ways. Unable to form conventional guitar chords
because of weakness in her left hand, the singer experimented with alternate tunings
that have since become part of her signature sound. Free-thinking and artistic, teenage Joni Mitchell
had little use for high school. In 1979, she told Rolling Stone, "The way I saw the educational system from
an early age was that it taught you what to think, not how to think." Joni Mitchell's teen years also saw her running
with a rough crowd. Fortunately, she had the foresight to escape
their influence. "There also came a stage when my friends who
were juvenile delinquents suddenly became criminals. They could go into very dull jobs or they
could go into crime. Crime is very romantic in your youth. I suddenly thought, 'Here's where the romance
ends. I don't see myself in jail...'" Joni Mitchell eventually earned her high school
diploma by picking up her failing courses in summer school. Free of the academic constraints of high school,
Mitchell was at last ready to embark on her lifelong dream of becoming a painter. "It would burn out my talent would have burnt
out long ago I think as a writer or a musician if it wasn't for the painting." Working as a waitress, she earned enough money
to begin her formal education in the visual arts. She enrolled in the Alberta College of Art
in Calgary, where she excelled in her classes. But, a year into her studies, she found the
prevailing attitudes in art education just as stifling as high school. Not happy with the school's pigeonholing of
students as either commercial or fine artists, Mitchell dropped out. In a 1976 interview archived at JoniMitchell.com,
she explains her frustration with the art school's focus on technical ability over creativity. "I found that I was an honor student at art
school for the same reason that I was a bad student — an equal and opposite reason — because
I had developed a lot of technical ability. [...] So I became pretty disillusioned with
art college, even though I enjoyed being near the head of my class for the first time in
my life." Years later, Mitchell contends that art school
had a negative effect on her painting. "Some of my art education has been something
that I've had to undo. It's been a long time coming for me to find
myself as a painter because I was educated badly in that area." While attending the Alberta College of Art,
Joni Mitchell supported herself as a department store model. While pursuing her studies, she developed
an interest in music and taught herself to play guitar. Soon, the struggling art student was supplementing
her income performing in Alberta coffeehouses. Around this time, Joni Mitchell had a tryst
with a fellow artist named Brad MacMath. Following the fling, Mitchell discovered that
she was pregnant. When MacMath found out, he abandoned Mitchell
and left for California. Virtually penniless and fearing her parents'
scorn, she fled to Toronto to give birth to the daughter she would name Kelly Dale Anderson. Unable to provide for the child, Mitchell
gave her up for adoption. It was a decision that would haunt her and
influence her music for the rest of her life, per The New Yorker. In an interview with CBC, Mitchell relates
the circumstances of her pregnancy and took issue with a commonly reported misconception: "I see it written again and again that I gave
up my daughter to further my career. This is so wrong, there was no career." Joni Mitchell met folk musician Chuck Mitchell
in the spring of 1965. Just 36 hours after meeting at Toronto's Penny
Farthing Coffee House, the couple married. Soon after, they began performing as a duo,
singing in Detroit-area folk music venues such as Chess Mate and The Raven Gallery. However, the marriage was on shaky ground
from the start. Joni has since described her time with Chuck
Mitchell as a "marriage of convenience" that existed solely as a means for gaining custody
of her daughter. In 1997, she told the Los Angeles Times, "One month into the marriage, he chickened
out, I chickened out. The marriage had no basis, except to provide
a home for the baby." Yet, Chuck Mitchell's failure to follow through
with helping Joni reunite with her baby wasn't their only source of marital strife. Chuck, a well-educated man several years Joni's
senior, often made her feel intellectually inadequate. As recounted in David Jaffe's 2017 biography
"Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell," Joni once lamented that she was "illiterate"
in comparison to Chuck. However, there's little doubt that Chuck Mitchell's
condescending attitude toward his young wife was born from insecurity and the fact that
she was rapidly outshining and outgrowing him as a musician and songwriter. By 1968, the marriage was over. By the end of the '60s, Joni Mitchell's star
was on the rise. As her power as an artist grew, she also came
into her own as a liberated woman. She told biographer David Jaffe, "I was in my mid-20s when I started to realize
— with absolute exhilaration and a little fear — that my life was not going to play
out on the same traditional feminine timeline as my mother and grandmothers." Embracing the free love movement of the era,
Mitchell left a string of famous paramours in her wake. In 1967, just prior to her divorce from Chuck
Mitchell, she moved to L.A.'s Laurel Canyon and began a relationship with David Crosby
of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. Soon after, she fell for Crosby's bandmate
Graham Nash, with whom she seriously contemplated marriage. Throughout the 1970s, Mitchell was romantically
linked with a number of famous men in the entertainment industry including. Along with a turbulent love life, success
exposed Joni Mitchell to other excesses. In 1975, while touring with Bob Dylan's Rolling
Thunder Revue, Mitchell became addicted to cocaine. Although the drug fueled the writing of her
1976 album Hejira, it caused Mitchell to suffer bouts of insomnia. It would take her years to completely overcome
her addiction. Cited as an influential album by artists ranging
from Bob Dylan to Taylor Swift, Joni Mitchell's fifth album, Blue, released in 1971, marked
a turning point in her career. Blue is, at times, painfully personal. Rooted in Mitchell's depression, the album
lays bare the whole of her turbulent life with songs that detail everything, from her
many fractured relationships to a veiled ode to the child she gave up. While recording Blue, Mitchell's melancholy
seemed to imbue her with a nearly unbearable sense of empathy and insight. She told her biographer, "I could see painfully — things about people
I didn't want to know. I'd just look at a person and I'd know too
much about them that I didn't want to know. And because everything was becoming transparent,
I felt I must be transparent, and I cried. That's how I felt. Like my guts were on the outside. I wrote 'Blue' in that condition." Despite its highly confessional nature, Blue
proved to be anything but cathartic for Mitchell. Writing and recording and then performing
the songs from the album night after night in front of sold-out audiences took an emotional
toll on the songwriter. She told Marie Claire in a 2014 interview, "Some people would call it a nervous breakdown,
but I just hit that pocket that everyone does on some point in their journey through their
lives. That identity crisis, that 'Who am I, really?' If you're lucky, it hits you early, like me." In 1974, Joni Mitchell released the album
Court and Spark. It was an instant hit. Charming both fans and critics with such signature
songs as "Help Me," her only Top 10 Billboard single, Court and Spark was the pinnacle of
Mitchell's commercial success. Mitchell's next album, 1975's The Hissing
of Summer Lawns, however, would mark a transition to a more experimental, jazz-influenced sound. Alienating longtime fans and confusing critics,
the album took a drubbing from the press. Rolling Stone praised the songwriting but
lambasted the music, calling the album, quote, "a great collection of pop poems with a distracting
soundtrack." Mitchell feared for her career. In 1985, she told People, "If they had just said they'd hated it, I
could have taken it. When other publications picked up the same
attitude, I thought, 'I'll finish up this contract and quit making records.'" Still, the singer-songwriter would not be
deterred in her pursuit of musical experimentation. She told Rolling Stone in 1979, "You have two options. You can stay the same and protect the formula
that gave you your initial success. They're going to crucify you for staying the
same. If you change, they're going to crucify you
for changing. [...] I'd rather be crucified for changing." 1982 would prove an important year for Joni
Mitchell. Entering her third decade in the music business,
Mitchell took a break from jazz to explore pop music for her 11th studio album, Wild
Things Run Fast. While recording the album, she met bassist
Larry Klein, who would become instrumental in shaping the album's direction. The couple soon became romantically involved,
and they married the same year. Klein and Mitchell were a creative powerhouse. Klein co-produced Mitchell's next album, 1985's
Dog Eat Dog, which continued in the pop-oriented direction of Wild Things Run Fast. Yet, 1985 found Joni Mitchell in the midst
of another personal tragedy. Pregnant at 42, Mitchell miscarried in her
first trimester. Klein decided to keep a professional commitment,
leaving his wife to deal with the aftermath alone. Later, Mitchell would claim that Klein's choice
to prioritize business over her well-being was a contributing factor to their divorce
in 1994. Still, Klein and Mitchell maintained an amicable
relationship through their breakup. Although their marriage was over, their creative
partnership remained in full bloom. Klein produced Mitchell's Grammy Award-winning
album Turbulent Indigo, hailed by Rolling Stone as her best album since the 1970s. Regret over giving her daughter up for adoption
in 1965 haunted Joni Mitchell her entire life. In 1971, the singer-songwriter would memorialize
the tragedy in the heartbreaking song "Little Green" from her iconic album Blue. Mitchell told the Los Angeles Times in 1997
that she "worried constantly" about her daughter in the intervening years since their separation. Though Mitchell kept her secret for decades,
a former art school classmate sold the story of her first pregnancy to a tabloid. Although Mitchell had secretly searched for
her daughter without success for years, this betrayal by a one-time friend at last led
to Mitchell's reunion with her long-lost daughter. Around the same time, Kelly Dale Anderson,
now known as Kilauren Gibb, was searching for her birth parents. Her research led her to the unmistakable conclusion
that she was the daughter of Joni Mitchell. Mother and daughter met for the first time
in 1997 and enjoyed a few years of happiness together. However, their relationship soured. In 2001, a physical altercation in which Mitchell
allegedly slapped Gibb led to their estrangement. By the next decade, though, Mitchell and Gibb
seemed to be on the road to reconciliation. Mitchell spoke about her relationship with
her daughter in a 2013 interview with the Toronto Star. "She was pretty rough on me and conscripted
my granddaughter, but we've worked through all of that. We reminisced about all the little tricks
we pulled and the ways we can hurt each other. That's over." For years, Joni Mitchell has claimed to suffer
from a little-understood malady known as Morgellons Disease. Described by the Mayo Clinic as a controversial,
unexplained skin condition "characterized by small fibers or other particles emerging
from skin sores." Medical experts disagree about the nature
of the ailment and continue to debate whether the disease even exists. Mitchell opened up to the Los Angeles Times
about her struggle with the mystery ailment in 2010, saying "I have this weird, incurable disease that
seems like it's from outer space. Fibers in a variety of colors protrude out
of my skin like mushrooms after a rainstorm: they cannot be forensically identified as
animal, vegetable or mineral." In March 2015, Joni Mitchell was found unconscious
in her Los Angeles home. The singer was committed to intensive care,
where she underwent tests which revealed she had suffered a crippling brain aneurysm. Although an early report from musician David
Crosby indicated that she couldn't speak, Mitchell's representatives denied this, stating
that she "was speaking, and speaking well" but that she wasn't able to walk and would
require extensive therapy. Mitchell was soon well enough to return home,
but her recovery is still ongoing. Largely disappearing from the public eye for
a while, the legendary performer has made a few appearances in recent years. A hopeful James Taylor, friend and collaborator
to Mitchell, spoke about her with The Guardian in early 2020, "She's coming back — which is an amazing
thing to be able to do — and I wonder what she has to tell us about that." "I've had a very interesting and a very challenging
life but I have a tremendous will to live." Check out one of our newest videos right here! Plus, even more Grunge videos about your favorite
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