Joni Mitchell

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Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell

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Joni Mitchell

Canadian singer-songwriter

Also known as: Roberta Joan Anderson

Written by Lucy M. O'Brien

Fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Last Updated: Jul 11, 2025 • Article History

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Original name:: Roberta Joan Anderson

Born:: November 7, 1943, Fort McLeod, Alberta, Canada (age 81)

Awards And Honors:: Grammy Award (2024); Kennedy Center Honors (2021); Grammy Award (2007); Order of Canada (2004); Grammy Award (2000); Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum (1997); Grammy Award (1995); Grammy Award (1974); Grammy Award (1969)

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Joni Mitchell Honoured With the Royal Canadian Geographical Society’s Gold Medal • July 7, 2025, 4:25 AM ET (Billboard Canada)

Joni Mitchell (born November 7, 1943, Fort McLeod, Alberta, Canada) is a Canadian experimental singer-songwriter and one of the foremost folk music artists of the late 20th century. Her music reached its greatest popularity in the 1970s but has continued to be influential among 21st-century musicians. Once described as the “Yang to Bob Dylan’s Yin, equaling him in richness and profusion of imagery,” Mitchell, like her 1960s contemporary, turned pop music into an art form.

Early life and career

Mitchell studied commercial art in her native Alberta before moving to Toronto in 1964 and performing at local folk clubs and coffeehouses. After a brief marriage to folksinger Chuck Mitchell, she relocated to New York City, where in 1967 she made her eponymous debut album (also known as Songs to a Seagull). Produced by David Crosby, this concept album was acclaimed for the maturity of its lyrics.

Studio albums

Song to a Seagull (1968)
Clouds (1969)
Ladies of the Canyon (1970)
Blue (1971)
For the Roses (1972)
Court and Spark (1974)
The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975)
Hejira (1976)
Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter (1977)
Mingus (1979)
Wild Things Run Fast (1982)
Dog Eat Dog (1985)
Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm (1988)
Night Ride Home (1991)
Turbulent Indigo (1994)
Taming the Tiger (1998)
Both Sides Now (2000)
Travelogue (2002)
Shine (2007)

Clouds, Blue, “Big Yellow Taxi,” and “Woodstock”

With each successive release, Mitchell gained a larger following, from Clouds (which in 1969 won a Grammy Award for best folk performance) to the mischievous euphoria of Ladies of the Canyon (1970) to Blue (1971), which was her first million-selling album. By the early 1970s Mitchell had branched out from her acoustic base to experiment with pop, rock, and jazz, notably on Court and Spark (1974), which ultimately became her best-selling album. The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975) further indicated a transition to a more complex, layered sound. Whereas earlier albums were more confessional in their subject matter, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, on which she satirized the role of the 1970s housewife, showed Mitchell’s movement toward social observation. Although she had a number of pop hits, especially in 1970 with “Big Yellow Taxi” and “Woodstock” (this song about the famous festival spawned three hit cover versions by other artists), Mitchell’s impact was as a long-term “album artist.” With its carefully precise yet improvisational feel, her music is at times difficult to listen to. She does not opt for straight melody or satisfying conclusions. “My music is not designed to grab instantly. It’s designed to wear for a lifetime, to hold up like a fine cloth,” she once said.

American singer and political activist Joan Baez performing at the Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C., August 28, 1963. Photo by Rowland Scherman. See Content Notes.

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Hejira, Mingus, and visual art pursuits

With Hejira (1976) and Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter (1977), she continued to disregard commercial considerations, while Mingus (1979) was considered by many as beyond the pale. An album that began as a collaboration with the jazz bassist Charles Mingus ended up as a treatment of his themes after his death. Mitchell moved ever further beyond her own experience, delving not only deeper into jazz but also into Black history; the album was as much a voice for the dispossessed as it was a biography of Mingus. Though fans were confused, Mingus remains a brave homage that does not fit neatly into either the rock or jazz genre.

Having proved that she could make commercially successful albums and win critical acclaim, Mitchell became a prestige artist. Moreover, because her songs had become hits for others, she was a source of considerable publishing revenue for her record companies. As a result, they went along with her musical experiments. After Mingus, however, Mitchell stood back a little from the pop world. From the beginning of her career she had illustrated her own album covers, so it was not surprising that in the 1980s she began to develop her visual art, undecided about whether to concentrate more on painting or music.

Later albums

Joni MitchellAlthough having reached its greatest popularity in the 1970s, Joni Mitchell's music continued to influence 21st-century musicians.

Although not as prolific as in the 1960s and ’70s, Mitchell continued to create penetrating imaginative music, from the Thomas Dolby-produced Dog Eat Dog (1985) to the more reflective Night Ride Home (1991) and the Grammy Award-winning Turbulent Indigo (1994). Having dealt with international political and social issues such as Ethiopian famine on Dog Eat Dog, she returned by the early 1990s to more personal subject matter—singing about true love, for instance, on Turbulent Indigo. Though unworried about pop chart trends, in 1997 she enjoyed major success with a new, younger audience when Janet Jackson sampled from Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” for the massive hit “Got ’Til It’s Gone.” In 1997 she published a new collection of her work, Joni Mitchell: The Complete Poems and Lyrics.

Taming the Tiger (1998) further mined her personal life for inspiration, notably on the track “Stay in Touch,” a nod to the daughter she gave up for adoption in 1965 and with whom she reunited in 1997. She covered standards on Both Sides Now (2000) and reworked a wide-ranging selection of her oeuvre on Travelogue (2002). On Shine (2007), her first album recorded for the Starbucks coffee chain’s music label, she returned to themes of environmental and social justice. Mitchell also issued several retrospective compilations, including The Beginning of Survival (2004), Dreamland (2004), Songs of a Prairie Girl (2005), and the 53-song omnibus Love Has Many Faces: A Quartet, A Ballet, Waiting to Be Danced (2014). Her continuing influence was shown by the release of the tribute album Joni 75: A Birthday Celebration (2019), on which such artists as Chaka Khan, Diana Krall, Rufus Wainwright, Norah Jones, James Taylor, and Emmylou Harris performed Mitchell’s songs.

In 2022 Mitchell performed her first full-length concert in 22 years, a surprise set at the Newport Folk Festival. The following year the concert was released to rave reviews as the live album Joni Mitchell at Newport, which won a Grammy for best folk album in 2024. Mitchell’s performance at that awards ceremony marked the first time in her career that she had appeared at the Grammys as a musical act. Introduced by singer Brandi Carlile as “the matriarch of imagination,” Mitchell was given a standing ovation after performing her song “Both Sides Now.”

Legacy and honors

One of the first women in modern rock to achieve enviable longevity and critical recognition, Mitchell was a major inspiration to everyone from Bob Dylan and Prince to a later generation of female artists such as Suzanne Vega and Alanis Morissette. Although she regularly collaborated with producers and arrangers—such as Jaco Pastorius, Mike Gibbs, and Larry Klein—Mitchell maintained coproducer credit and always had control over her material. Her songs were covered by a range of stars, including Dylan, Fairport Convention, Judy Collins, Johnny Cash, and Crosby, Stills and Nash. Mitchell was awarded the Polar Music Prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Music in 1996, and she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997. In 2002 she won a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement, and two years later she was made a Companion of the Order of Canada. In 2021 Mitchell received a Kennedy Center Honor, and two years later she was named the recipient of the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song.

Lucy M. O'Brien The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

folk music

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folk music summary

folk music

Written by Bruno Nettl

Fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Last Updated: Jun 11, 2025 • Article History

Key People:: Ronnie Gilbert; Jean Ritchie; Dave Van Ronk; Mary Travers; Fred Hellerman

Related Topics:: Newport Folk Festival; mariachi; folk song; vallenato; freak folk

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folk music, type of traditional and generally rural music that originally was passed down through families and other small social groups. Typically, folk music, like folk literature, lives in oral tradition; it is learned through hearing rather than reading. It is functional in the sense that it is associated with other activities, and it is primarily rural in origin. The usefulness of the concept varies from culture to culture, but it is most convenient as a designation of a type of music of Europe and the Americas.

The concept of folk music

The term folk music and its equivalents in other languages denote many different kinds of music; the meaning of the term varies according to the part of the world, social class, and period of history. In determining whether a song or piece of music is folk music, most performers, participants, and enthusiasts would probably agree on certain criteria derived from patterns of transmission, social function, origins, and performance.

The central traditions of folk music are transmitted orally or aurally, that is, they are learned through hearing rather than the reading of words or music, ordinarily in informal, small social networks of relatives or friends rather than in institutions such as school or church. In the 20th century, transmission through recordings and mass media began to replace much of the face-to-face learning. In comparison with art music, which brings aesthetic enjoyment, and popular music, which (often along with social dancing) functions as entertainment, folk music is more often associated with other activities, such as calendric or life-cycle rituals, work, games, enculturation, and folk religion; folk music is also more likely to be participatory than presentational.

The concept applies to cultures in which there is also an urban, technically more sophisticated musical tradition maintained by and for a smaller social, economic, and intellectual elite in cities, courts, or urbanized cultures. Generally, “folk music” refers to music that broad segments of the population—particularly the lower socioeconomic classes—understand, and with which they identify. In this respect it is the rural counterpart to urban popular music, although that music depends mainly on the mass media—recordings, radio, television, and to some degree the Internet—for dissemination.

Traditionally, folk music performers were amateurs, and some folk songs were literally known to all members of a community; but specialists—instrumentalists and singers of narratives—were important to folk communities. In the 20th century, the role of professionals as performers and carriers of folk traditions expanded dramatically. Folk music as it is believed to have existed in earlier times may be discussed separately from periods of revival such as that of 19th-century European nationalism and the 20th-century revivals, shortly before and after World War II, that were motivated by political agendas. In the context of popular music, performances of “folk music” may be distinguished by the use of songs with political agendas and the use of traditional instruments and acoustic guitars. On the other side of the musical spectrum, lines between folk music and art music were blurred beginning in the 19th century, when art music composers introduced songs from folklore into urban musical culture.

Young girl wearing a demin jacket playing the trumpet (child, musical instruments, Asian ethnicity)

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The terms used for folk music in different cultures illuminate aspects of the concept. The English term and its French and Italian analogues, musique populaire and musica popolare, indicate that this is music associated with a social class, the “folk.” The German Volksmusik (“people’s music”) combines the concept of class with the unification of an ethnic group, as does the Hindi term log git (“the people’s music”) in India. Czech, like some of the other Slavic languages, uses the term narod (“nation”) and its relatives, indicating that folk music is the musical unifier of all Czechs. Conversely, the Persian term mūsīqī-ye maḥallī (“regional music”) emphasizes the distinctions in folk music style and repertory among different areas of Iran. The term folk music has also, perhaps unwisely, been used for traditional art musics of Asian and African cultures, to distinguish them from the Western classical system.

The typical 21st-century conception of folk music comes from beliefs about the nature of music and musical life in the village cultures of Europe from the 18th into the 19th century; but this traditional folk music culture was affected greatly by the rise of industrial society and of cities, as well as by nationalist movements beginning in the 19th century. Both the threat to folk culture and the rise of nationalism spurred revival and preservation movements in which learned musicians, poets, and scholars provided leadership. In the 20th century, further revivals associated folk music with political and social movements and blurred the musical distinctions among folk, art, and popular musics. Nevertheless, vigorous remnants of the traditional culture of folk music were retained in 19th-century western Europe and in eastern Europe into the 20th century; these are the bases for the following characterization.