Do we like Joni Mitchell?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Decent record on vaccines and speaking out against Trump, held back by a blackface persona she has defended rather than disowned.
Joni Mitchell was born Roberta Joan Anderson on 7 November 1943 in Fort Macleod, Alberta, and she's now spent more than 60 years living in the United States. She's long been filed under folk, a label she pushed back on. In a 2020 interview she said “I was never a folk singer.” She'd rather you see her catalogue like a painter's retrospective, growth room by room.
The big stain is the blackface persona. At a Halloween party in 1976 she dressed as a Black man called Art Nouveau, then wore the costume on the cover of her 1977 album Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, and the character resurfaced in later work. Her biographer David Yaffe says the costume carries “historical baggage”, much of it unknown to her at the time. Mitchell's own defence, as reported by Far Out Magazine, is that “it wasn't stereotypical, it was individual.” Critics call it offensive minstrelry, and we found no apology.
On the wider harm check, the record is better. In January 2022 she pulled her music from Spotify in solidarity with Neil Young, over what the protest said was Covid vaccine misinformation on Joe Rogan's podcast. She said that “irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives.” Her 1970s catalogue reappeared on Spotify in March 2024 without any announcement from her. We found nothing from her against LGBTQ+ or trans people, and nothing worrying in her recent collaborators, though the record on that is thin.
The recent news is political. Accepting a lifetime achievement award at the Junos in March, her first trip home in years, she told the crowd “I'm living in the States, and you know what's happening there.” Then in October she shared her US citizenship ceremony on Instagram, captioned “A journey that began 62 years ago.” She hasn't said why she chose to naturalise now, and she is expected to keep her Canadian citizenship too.
The good stuff is mostly speaking up. She took a public stand on vaccines in 2022 at the cost of giving up streaming income. The Junos created a Lifetime Achievement Award and made her only the third person to receive it. We found no big charity record in what we read, so we won't pretend there is one.
Put together, she's a yes from us, with the asterisk in plain sight. The blackface persona was decades ago, but she has defended it rather than disowned it, and that matters. Everything else we found points the right way, from her vaccine protest to her public stand against Trump. Her accolades are on the record, and so is that one very ugly costume.