walking upstream…
Joni Mitchell
photo: matt gibbons · cc by 2.0 ↗Joni Mitchell
sourcesGuitar Player — "I got my fingers rapped with a ruler..." (piano-teacher anecdote, open tunings) · American Songwriter — Joni Mitchell's two earliest musical influences (record-store listening booth, Rachmaninoff) · BrainyQuote — Joni Mitchell on Rachmaninoff ("made a musician out of me") · KSMU/NPR — "Her Kind of Blue" (Mitchell on the muted-trumpet quality of "Blue"'s opening) · Joni Mitchell Library archive — New York Times, March 17, 1991 ("My major influence as a singer was Edith Piaf") · Songfacts — "Edith and the Kingpin" (Mojo 2008 quote on the Vancouver-pimp/Piaf hybrid character)
In a Saskatoon piano lesson sometime in the 1950s, a teacher rapped young Joni Mitchell's knuckles with a ruler for trying to write her own tunes instead of reading someone else's. "Why would you want to compose music?" the teacher asked, by Mitchell's own account decades later. Childhood polio had already weakened her hands; when she picked up guitar, she sidestepped standard chord shapes altogether, eventually inventing more than fifty open tunings that let a compromised hand reach for orchestral harmony. That refusal of received method carried her from Saskatoon coffeehouses through 1971's unguarded, diary-plain "Blue" and into the jazz-inflected records of the mid-1970s — an artist who kept rewriting the rules she'd been handed rather than obeying them.
the sound in question
1969
Both Sides, NowJoni Mitchell
walk the tributaries ↓
Miles Davis1950s–70s · Jazz / Modal jazz / Jazz fusion
A high school classmate once paid Mitchell for painting a jazz mural on his bedroom wall — not in cash, but in records. "He paid me in records," she recalled, "and among them was a Miles Davis record and that started a shift in me." What she absorbed from listening wasn't a lick or a chord voicing but a way of bending pitch toward feeling instead of accuracy. "Miles has taught me much as a singer," she told an interviewer decades later. "He freed me up as a singer probably more than most of the singers I've absorbed."
listen: upstream & heresource: Steve Rowland Media — 2016 Los Angeles interview excerpt (Miles Davis record payment, vocal freedom) ↗
1959
Blue in GreenMiles Davis
1971
BlueJoni Mitchell
listen forOn "Blue in Green," Davis's muted trumpet holds notes just off true pitch, leaning into and out of tune for expressive weight rather than clean intonation, floating over a nearly static chord pattern. Mitchell said the opening of her own "Blue" worked the same way: "the first few notes... sound like a muted trumpet tone." Play them back to back and notice how her voice, like his horn, leans on a note rather than striking it — the pitch arriving late, softened, more felt than hit.
Édith Piaf1940s-50s · Chanson / Cabaret
The second record Joni Mitchell ever owned, bought as a girl in Saskatoon before she owned a guitar, was Édith Piaf singing "The Three Bells." Decades on, asked to name the singer who shaped her most, she didn't equivocate: "My major influence as a singer was Edith Piaf," she told the New York Times in 1991. The debt surfaced directly in 1975, when she named a character after her hero: "In 'Edith and the Kingpin,' part of it is from a Vancouver pimp I met and part of it is Edith Piaf" — a hybrid, she said, that made "a whole truth."
listen: upstream & here
1946
La Vie en roseÉdith Piaf
1975
Edith and the KingpinJoni Mitchell
listen forPiaf's voice on "La Vie en rose" rides behind the beat, dragging notes out until the sentiment nearly outpaces the melody — vibrato used for emphasis, not decoration. On "Edith and the Kingpin," set to a noir-lounge slink of electric piano and brushed drums, Mitchell tries a related move: she half-speaks certain lines, letting the vocal lag behind the groove the way Piaf's lags behind the orchestra, favoring a character's mood over a clean read of the tune. The resemblance is in the delivery, not the melody.
Sergei Rachmaninoff1900s–10s · Romantic / Classical / Piano concerto
At a record store near her Saskatoon home, a kid could carry a 78 into a glass listening booth but couldn't buy it — you just listened, then handed it back. Inside one of those booths, young Joni Mitchell discovered Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, its 18th variation searing itself into her ear as, she later said, "the most beautiful melody I ever heard." Elsewhere she went further: "Rachmaninoff made a musician out of me... it was a tender entreaty for the misunderstood." The romantic, voice-led melodic writing she absorbed in that booth would resurface in her own chord voicings.
listen: upstream & here
1934
Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (18th Variation)Sergei Rachmaninoff
1971
RiverJoni Mitchell
listen forThe 18th variation inverts Paganini's original theme into a long, unhurried melodic arc that rises over harmony sliding underneath it, never resolving quite where you'd expect. "River" opens the same way structurally: solo piano stating a melody — that famous descending "Jingle Bells" fragment — before Mitchell's voice enters and stretches over chords that keep sliding past one another rather than settling. Neither piece rushes its line to the tonic; both let one voice, piano first, carry the emotional weight before anything else joins in.