Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell

NPR music critic Powers (Good Booty) paints a dazzling portrait of a legendary musician whose restless creativity fueled her multifaceted career in the folk, jazz, rock, and soul genres. Powers traces Mitchell’s musical evolution beginning with a childhood bout of polio that weakened her left hand and led her to fashion a style of open tunings and fingerpickings on guitar. From there, Powers documents Mitchell’s immersion in folk music, forays into jazz in the early 1970s, romances and collaborations with fellow musicians James Taylor and Don Alias, and recovery from a 2015 brain aneurysm. Throughout, Powers foregrounds Mitchell’s penchant for journeys both literal (she penned songs on road trips) and metaphorical. Of the sense of experimentation that animated Mitchell’s 1970s songs, Power writes, “this was the sound of the brain inquiring about itself.” The view of Mitchell that emerges is expansive, nuanced, and generally admiring, without letting her off the hook. For example, though Powers criticizes Mitchell’s decision to wear blackface on the cover of her 1977 album Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, she takes care to acknowledge the complexities involved, citing scholar Miles Grier’s suggestion that Mitchell’s “desire to claim Black masculinity” was, in her mind, a “way out of the... trap” of being a “maligned woman artist.” The result is a dynamic portrayal of an artist whose “journey would be, throughout her life, her destination.” (June)