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Folk music is defined as music that originates in traditional popular culture or that is written in such a style. Folk music is typically of unknown authorship and is transmitted orally from generation to generation. Basically, folk music is the music of the folks. The music that they pass down to their children. Joni Mitchell is a folk singer and songwriter. This week we will learn about her and how she changed folk music.
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Roberta Joan Anderson was born on November 7, 1943, in Fort Macleod, Alberta, Canada. Her father, Bill, was a grocer and her mother, Myrtle, was a school teacher. Shortly after World War II, Joni and her parents moved to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, the "city of bridges," which Joni has since referred to as her hometown. It was there that she fell in love with music.
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Her best friend, at the time, was a piano prodigy. He introduced her to classical composers, such as Schubert and Mozart. She begged her parents to let her learn piano, so at the age of 7, Joni started piano lessons. Her teachers were very stern, and strict. When she mentioned that she wanted to write her own songs to play on the piano, one of them said, “why would you want to make up your own songs when you can have the masters under your fingers?". Although Joni heard melodies in her head that she wanted to get out, she felt stifled, so after a year and half of piano lessons, she quit.
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In Grade 7, Joni met a teacher who would have a great effect on her direction. Mr. Kratzman was an Australian who taught English at Queen Elizabeth school. Joni was a very good artist. She met Mr. Kratzman at the end of the school year while he was hanging her paintings at school. He once told her "If you can paint with a brush, you can paint with words." He was hard on her, but only because he knew she could be better.
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The next year in his class she wrote a poem about stallions. Mr. Kratzman used his red ink pen and circled the paper over and over commenting "cliche" with ever circle. He told her to write about things she knew, and thus helped to mold her remarkable ability for imagery and description. In the credits for her first album, Joni wrote: "This album is dedicated to Mr. Kratzman, who taught me to love words."
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Before Joni Mitchell came along, singer-songwriters concentrated on love and politics. After her, they sang about themselves - their fears, their pain, and how the loss of someone can leave you feeling like “the frying pan's too wide." (which was her way of saying, lonely).
When Joni was 9 years old, she got a horrible disease called polio. She was hospitalized for weeks, and loss the use of her legs for a long time. Since she could no longer play sports, she started thinking of having a career as an artist or musician. This is where the words started to form in her head that would eventually become songs. When she was about 17 years old, Joni decided she wanted to play the guitar. Her mother thought a guitar was too hillbilly for a young girl to play. So, Joni bought herself a ukulele and taught herself to play it. Eventually she taught herself guitar from a Pete Seeger songbook, but the polio had affected her fingers, and she had to devise dozens of alternative tunings of her own. This improvised approach later helped her break free of standard approaches to harmony and structure in her songwriting. |
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Joni Mitchell was not just another longhaired folky girl from the ‘60s. Though Mitchell did write some very influential songs during the folk revival, she pushed the boundaries of what it meant to be a female singer-songwriter—blending rock, world, jazz, and more with her folk sensibilities over the course of her four-decade career.
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In an off-the-cuff meeting with painter Georgia O’Keefe, O’Keefe told Mitchell that she couldn’t be a good painter and a good musician at the same time. Mitchell proved her wrong, as her art has been featured in books, as well as art galleries.
Joni Mitchell has won 7 Grammy Awards. In 1981, she was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, receiving the award from then Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997 by Shawn Colvin. |
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