Beginnings
Nicholas Jennings, from Before the Gold Rush: Flashbacks to the Dawn of the Canadian Sound (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 1997)
In 1958, Joni Mitchell was still Joan Anderson, a fifteen-year-old living in Saskatoon. That year, she purchased her first instrument – a $36 baritone ukulele – with money she earned from modelling. The ukulele was an alternative to a guitar, which her mother had strictly forbidden. But it enabled her to accompany herself singing Kingston Trio songs and other folk material of the day. Coincidentally, Neil Young also received a ukulele from his parents around the same time, while living in Pickering, Ontario. The thirteen-year-old Young, who, like Mitchell, also suffered a childhood case of polio, had been inspired by seeing Elvis perform on TV’s Ed Sullivan Show.
As the only child born to William and Myrtle Anderson in Fort McLeod, Alberta, Roberta Joan had grown up in Saskatoon – not far from [Buffy] Sainte-Marie’s own birthplace on the Cree Indian Piapot Reserve in the Qu’Appelle Valley. A self-described ‘good-time Charlie’, Joni first wrecked her stockings dancing to the jukebox jive of Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley and the Coasters. But at a certain point, like many teenagers in the early ’60s, she traded rock’s ‘jungle rhythms’ for the more cerebral qualities of folk music. ‘Rock’n’roll went through a really dumb, vanilla period,’ she recalled. ‘And during that period, folk came in to fill the hole.’
At parties, Anderson began to lead singalongs, accompanying herself on baritone ukulele with chords she’d learned from a Pete Seeger instruction record. While performing at a local wiener roast in 1961, the eighteen-year-old caught the fancy of some people connected with Prince Albert’s TV station who promptly booked her as a one-time replacement for a late-night moose-hunting show. Two years later, while working as a waitress at Saskatoon’s Louis Riel coffee house, Anderson ventured to the stage during one of the Riel’s weekly ‘hoot nights’. Sitting on a stool, the pigtailed performer screeched into the microphone and plunked away on her ukulele for some puzzled onlookers.
Indeed, her developing taste for folk music left more than a few people bewildered. ‘My friends who knew me as a rock’n’roll dancer found this change kind of hard to relate to,’ she admitted recently. ‘The songs at that time [were] folk songs and English ballads, and English ballads are always [about] “the cruel mother” and there’s a lot of sorrow in them. But they had beautiful melodies, that was the thing, and I always loved melody. Melody is generally melancholy and sad and the text that accompanies it must be the same.’
In the fall of ’63, Anderson enrolled at the Alberta College of Art in Calgary to pursue her interest in painting. But she continued to entertain thoughts of becoming a folk singer and was soon showing up at Calgary’s Depression coffee house. Will Millar, then a budding folk singer and later the leader of the Irish Rovers, recalls: ‘Joni came with her uke and tormented us all with a shrill “Sloop John B” and “I With I Wath an Apple on a Twee”.’ But by the following year, Anderson had improved enough that the Depression paid her $15 to entertain weekend audiences of mostly fellow art students. She even got hired to perform at Edmonton’s Yardbird Suite coffee house, which, along with the Depression and Vancouver’s Bunkhouse, was a major stop on the folk circuit in Western Canada.
With a guitar now in hand, Joni Anderson purchased a one-way train ticket from Calgary to Toronto and set out to attend Mariposa in July ’64. She’d quit art college and, whether she knew it yet or not, was a couple of months pregnant – the result of a love affair with fellow art student Brad MacMath. Somewhere between the Prairies and the Lakehead, she penned her first song, ‘Day by Day’, a bluesy piece written to the rhythm of the train wheels that she later described as a ‘feeling-sorry-for-myself’ song.
Joni arrived in Toronto and took a bus up to Orillia only to find that Mariposa was in trouble. The previous year’s festival had attracted such an unexpected flood of people that the town of Orillia had been overwhelmed. Although it was hardly a disaster of Woodstock proportions, there had been complaints of traffic jams, inadequate facilities and well-publicised acts of drunken debauchery. The local police chief claimed that the festival had given Orillia ‘the worst forty-eight hours in its history’. So even though Mariposa had been granted permission to use nearby farmland for the ’64 festival, a nervous town council blocked the move at the last minute – and the courts upheld the decision just one day before the festival was scheduled to open.
When Anderson and other early birds showed up, organisers were in complete chaos, faced with the monumental task of packing up and moving several tons of equipment and supplies back to Toronto, where the Maple Leaf baseball stadium had been lined up as a last-minute venue. According to the festival’s Martin Onrot, Joni helped to load trucks along with other volunteers. Then, at the stadium by Lake Ontario, she and others braved the rain and cold temperatures to watch performances by blues legends Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Mississippi John Hurt and others. In particular, Anderson studied the distinctive vibrato style of Sainte-Marie, who enjoyed no fewer than four standing ovations.
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