Joni Mitchell was born Roberta Joan Anderson in Fort Macleod, Alberta, Canada, to Bill Anderson and Myrtle Anderson (née McKee). Her mother was a teacher, and her father a Royal Canadian Air Force flyer. During the war years, she moved with her parents to a number of bases in western Canada. After the war, her father began working as a grocer, and his work took the family to Saskatchewan to the towns of Maidstone and North Battleford. When she was 11, the family settled in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, which Joni considers her hometown.
She began taking piano lessons at age seven, and immediately felt the creative instinct to write her own music. Meanwhile, she excelled at art in school. In grade 7 her English teacher, Mr. Kratzman, told her, "If you can paint with a brush, you can paint with words."
At the age of nine, Joni contracted polio during a Canadian epidemic, but recovered after a stay in the hospital, during which she first became interested in singing. She was hospitalized in winter, and remembered, "They said I might no[t] walk again, and that I would not be able to go home for Christmas. I wouldn't go for it. So I started to sing Christmas carols and I used to sing them real loud....The boy in the bed next to me, you know, used to complain. And I discovered I was a ham." Joni also took up cigarette smoking at the same age, which may explain the unique texture to her voice.
As a teenager she taught herself guitar and ukulele and began performing at parties. This grew into busking and playing in coffeehouses and other venues in Saskatoon. After finishing high school she attended the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary for a year, but then left and returned to the coffeehouse scene.
As Joni prepared to leave her home in Saskatoon to relocate to Toronto, she became pregnant. Seeing no other alternatives, she gave her daughter, Kelly Dale Anderson (born February 19, 1965), up for adoption. The experience remained private for most of her career, but she made allusions to it in several songs, most notably the song "Little Green," (from Blue) and, years later, the song "Chinese Cafe" from "Wild Things Run Fast" ("Your kids are coming up straight/My child's a stranger/I bore her/But I could not raise her"). Her daughter, renamed Kilauren Gibb, began a search for her as an adult, and the two were reunited in 1997.
Joni took her surname from a brief marriage to folksinger Chuck Mitchell in 1965. She performed frequently in coffeehouses and folk clubs and, by this time creating her own material, became well known for her unique songwriting and her innovative guitar style. Personal and often self-consciously poetic, her songs were strengthened by her extraordinarily wide-ranging voice (with a range in pitch at one time covering over four octaves) and her striking guitar technique, which makes extensive use of alternative tunings.
While she was playing one night in "The Gaslight South", a club in Florida, David Crosby walked in and was immediately struck by her ability and her appeal as an artist. He took her back to Los Angeles, where he set about introducing her and her music to his friends.
Much of her initial acclaim was as a result of other artists covering her songs. Her first songwriting credit to hit the charts, "Urge for Going," was a success for country singer George Hamilton IV and for folk singer Tom Rush; it also appeared many years later as a B-side by the Scottish band Travis. Irish singer Luka Bloom also recorded the song to great effect, as has classical violinist Nigel Kennedy with a gentle, lilting instrumental version.
