Singers: Into the Pain of the Heart

From Guthrie to Dylan, contemporary folk composers have usually been their own best interpreters, but they have not always had an easy time trying to sing their own stuff.

Tim Hardin’s If I Were a Carpenter was a big hit for Bobby Darin, while Hardin’s own recording was ignored. Few people paid any attention to Laura Nyro’s version of Stoned Soul Picnic, but the song sold a million for The 5th Dimension.

For a time, Canada’s Joni Mitchell had much the same problem. She ranked as one of the best young composers in the business, and her tender ballad, Both Sides Now, was successfully recorded by Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and Judy Collins. But she never recorded the song herself, even though she has a fluty, vanilla-fresh voice with a haunting, pastoral quality.

Today, though, she is beginning to catch on as a singer as well as a song-smith. Joni was the unquestioned hit of last January’s Miami Pop Festival, and last weekend she started a concert tour that will take her to Boston, New York, Chicago, Ottawa and Montreal. At the end of April, she tapes a television show in Nashville with Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash. Her latest album has an advance sale of 100,000 copies, a month before its release. Furthermore, she has risen from obscure poverty to ownership of a music company valued at $1,500,000.

Out of Oblivion. Joni seriously took up music only five years ago. A native of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, she casually began playing the ukulele at 20, while an art student at Calgary, and drifted into folk music. In Toronto, she worked as a salesgirl to earn the $140 union fee so that she could perform in city cafes. Success was still out of sight when she met, married and eventually was divorced from a folk singer named Chuck Mitchell in Detroit. Meanwhile she had taken the first step out of oblivion by starting to write her own folk-styled songs.

Joni now occupies a secure place among today’s leading folk poets. Her evanescent tunes and lyrics primarily evoke moods, emotions and changes of scenery, instead of proclaiming social messages of political protest. They are songs about love or about a country girl’s cool-eyed reaction to urban life. I Had a King is a poetic description of her broken marriage:

I had a king dressed in drip-dry and paisley

Lately he’s taken to saying I’m crazyand blind . . .

I had a king in a salt-rusted carriage

Who carried me off to his country for marriage too soon.

In Nathan La Franeer, she views New York while riding with a crabby, avaricious cab driver:

I looked through window-glass at streets and Nathan grumbled at the grey

I saw an aging cripple selling Superman balloons

The city grated thru chrome-plate

The clock struck slowly half-past-noon.

Joni is a blue-eyed, freckle-faced girl with straight, waist-long blonde hair who doesn’t seem to care about her new wealth. She lives in a ramshackle house in Los Angeles’ Laurel Canyon, with secondhand trappings—brown velvet rockers, black and yellow crocheted throws, a giant antique wooden pig, an old piano, a doll, stained-glass windowpanes and a sewing machine on which she makes her own dresses.

Joni is still a bit awed before audiences. “At the Philadelphia Folk Festival, there was a roar from the audience,” she recalls. “It was almost frightening.” For a while she worried about the responsibility of writing for all those people. “But you can’t; you have to write for yourself.” To Joni, the secret of songwriting is living every emotion to the fullest. “If you are sad, then you should feel sad,” she says. “The French are good at that. They show what they feel and in that way purge themselves of it. My next album will be even sadder. It gets into the pain of the heart.”