Book Review: Reckless Daughter

Reckless Daughter: A Portrait Of Joni Mitchell

Author: David Yaffe

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

420 pages, including: Preface, Notes, Acknowledgments, and Index

This volume, by David Yaffe, professor of humanities at Syracuse University, is largely based on a series of interviews with Joni Mitchell and other musical colleagues, friends and enemies of Joni in the music industry, and others, over the course of several years up until 2015. Yaffe, of course, consults other written sources as well.

   Roberta Joan Anderson was born in Fort Macleod, Alberta, the daughter of Myrtle McKee a teacher and William Anderson a military man and later a grocery store executive. She was an only child.

   Joni discovered at an early age that she thought her parents had bad judgement, were rather conservative, and lacked vision.

   In her early years she lived in Maidstone, North Battleford, and Saskatoon—all in Saskatchewan.

   She was critical of the academic system—hated learning by rote, and said teachers taught students what to think rather than how to think. Her favourite things were dancing and art.

   Although she was not involved in music at an early age; she had friends who were and she attended music festivals which they participated in; and she developed the capacity to analyze music by observing judges.

   As a Sunday School student Joni was sceptical about the Bible. Her Sunday School teacher couldn’t answer her question: “Who was Cain’s wife?” She thought there were things missing in the biblical stories—that they were somehow incomplete.

   In school, most likely her favourite teacher was Arthur Kratzmann. He taught in a rather unorthodox way. However, even though he had perhaps higher expectations of Joni and was critical of her work; it was because he thought she had much potential as a writer.

   When she was ten, Joni was diagnosed with polio and spent some time in a Saskatoon polio colony. The polio strengthened Joni’s endurance and determination to defeat it. Enduring and overcoming polio may have led Joni to identify with the biblical story of Job—whom she eventually wrote a song about on her Turbulent Indigo album, called “The Sire of Sorrow (Job’s Sad Song).”

   While in high school Joni became a bit of a tomboy and started to play a ukulele, which her friends hated.

   After high school Joni studied for a year at Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary. She got pregnant and gave birth to a daughter out of wedlock. She eventually agreed to sign the papers to let her child be adopted.

   She moved to Toronto, met and married Chuck Mitchell; and began to write and sing at various venues. She divorced Chuck Mitchell and continued to improve as a singer-songwriter and ended up in the United States.

   Joni was influenced by Bob Dylan’s personal narrative style of songwriting.

   Judy Collins recorded Joni’s songs and introduced Joni and Leonard Cohen at the Newport Folk Festival. Joni had an affair with Leonard, and later an affair with David Crosby.

   Yaffe, through a series of interviews with Joni and several other musicians provides the historical contexts, influences, experiences, etc., behind Joni’s songs and albums. He provides detailed accounts of the process of recording albums.

   Many musicians recognized and praised Joni as a brilliant, gifted singer-songwriter—indeed, even the word genius has been employed to describe her music.

The irony however is that: “Joni thought of herself as a painter first, a musician second.” (p. 86)

   Crosby, Stills and Nash were formed in Joni’s living room house in Laurel Canyon. Joni and Graham Nash were in love with each other; Nash wanted to marry Joni; but she broke away from their relationship because she feared ending up in a traditional housewife role and her music career would suffer or even end.

   Joni’s Blue album has become her best selling one—over 10 million were sold in the U.S. alone. On it, she bares her soul and is perhaps most confessional of all her albums.

   After her Blue album, Joni was still struggling with depression, and she bought a stone cottage on British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast—living a quiet, reclusive life for a year. Here she wrote songs for her For the Roses album.

   Joni’s next album, Court and Spark moves in a different direction from her previous albums. In Court and Spark, Joni’s songs reflect influences of jazz and blues. The album sold over two million copies in its first year.

   Over the years Joni has produced a brilliant, creative open tuning method of sound that has influenced and inspired many musicians as well as attracted many listeners to her music. Although she was popular as a folk singer-songwriter, Joni also experimented and developed her career in the genres of jazz, techno-pop, electronic and rock.

   Joni’s successful career as a singer-songwriter has come at a cost. She has suffered the pain of broken relationships; in the past she was addicted to cocaine; she smoked four packages of cigarettes a day and lost her soprano voice; in 2015, she was unconscious with an aneurysm and had emergency brain surgery; among other factors.

   Although I appreciated many of the stories behind some of Joni’s songs and albums and the research involved in including them in this volume; occasionally I felt Yaffe focussed more on others’ perceptions of Joni than Joni’s own point-of-view. It also seemed that at times Yaffe went overboard with the name-dropping game leaving this reader wondering why. One further critique: Yaffe’s written sources at times seem to be rather sparse and dated. For example, I was at a loss to find any up-to-date written material sources cited by Yaffe in the last couple of chapters.

    All things considered, Reckless Daughter: A Portrait Of Joni Mitchell is a worthwhile read—profiling one of the most gifted, authentic, rebellious and creative musicians of our time.