Joni Mitchell, in her own words

There’s always been something at once girlish and steely about Joni Mitchell, the stellar Canadian whom Rolling Stone called ‘one of the greatest songwriters ever’. As Radio 4’s Verbatim programme in honour of her 80th birthday reminds us, a stubborn hopefulness has carried her through turbulent times. Perhaps growing up in Saskatchewan, where winter temperatures drop to –30°C, put an early stiffener in her soul. When she contracted polio, aged nine, her mother braved the hospital ward in a mask to bring her bedridden daughter a small Christmas tree, but little Joni made a promise to the tree that she would walk sufficiently well again to be allowed back home for Christmas. This she managed. Before hitting ten, she took up smoking.

At 20, while a penniless art student, she realised she was pregnant by an ex-boyfriend: a disastrous event in the days when, in her words, an unmarried mother was seen as ‘a criminal, a fallen woman’. She didn’t tell her parents, but instead gave birth to her baby daughter – later put up for adoption – in a Toronto hospital surrounded by disapproving staff, where ‘a lot of human ugliness came at me’. A doomed first marriage to a fellow folk singer, Chuck Mitchell, was forged and broken in just over a year. All was grist to the songwriting mill. ‘Pain is a teacher,’ she says here. ‘One of the best actually.’ She translated its lessons expertly: so many of her most famous songs – ‘Little Green’, ‘A Case of You’, ‘River’, ‘Coyote’ – are threaded with shimmering melancholy.

Mitchell’s story is largely told here in her own words, assembled from various interview clips spliced together and interspersed with songs. The effect is compelling but slightly disorienting, as the lighter, clean-cut tones of young Joni jostle with the more gravelly reflections of older Joni, without the listener having much idea of the shifting contexts of recordings.