In addition to informing her sound, it would have been in Calgary where she made the life-altering decision to pursue music rather than visual art.
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In a 1963 article in the Calgary Albertan, journalist Peter Mathews made a prediction about a 20-year-old artist named Joni Anderson.
The profile, titled Folk Singer: Two-Career Girl, was published with a picture of the singer sitting on a stool with her ukulele, grinning widely and sporting a fashionable-for-its-day 1960s Mary Tyler Moore hairdo. She is described by Mathews as “attractive, unattached and blessed with two talents,” a reference to both her success performing at Calgary’s Depression coffee house during its Sunday night hootenannies and as a fledgling art student in her first year at the Alberta College of Art. According to the article, she had become an “overnight favourite” at the Depression. The dilemma was that she was also being encouraged by her art instructor to give up music and make visual art her future.
“Whatever she decides, you have not heard the last of her,” Mathews wrote.
This was true, of course. But not everyone who watched young Joni Anderson croon traditional folk music at the basement coffee house in downtown Calgary was as enamoured. Even for those who were impressed, it’s probably safe to assume they could not have foreseen the journey she would take as Joni Mitchell, becoming one of the most celebrated artists of her generation.
The Albertan, which was the predecessor of the Calgary Sun, had published another article a few months earlier about the Depression, which occupied the basement of a building near 12th Avenue and 1st Street S.W. It was created by “bearded Torontonian” and folk impresario John Uren in 1963 during a folk-singing revival that was “sweeping the country.” According to an article written a month later in the Royal Reflector, the club was closed on Mondays, held chess night on Tuesdays and offered a “surprise night” where “anything could happen” on Wednesdays. Thursday was poetry night and folk music was played on Fridays and Saturdays.
‘You never knew in those heady ’60s days what was going to happen’
Sunday was reserved for what would now be considered an open-mic night for locals. At the time, these hootenannies were hosted by the Irish Rovers, the now-legendary act led by Irish-born singer-songwriter Will Millar.
“All the folkies came through in those days,” says Millar, who now lives on Vancouver Island. “Everybody dropped in, (including) Gordon Lightfoot. Joni Mitchell was just a young girl at that time. Every Sunday night we would run a hootenanny and people could put their name on the list and they would get up on stage and do their thing. I remember she had a baritone ukulele. That’s what she played in those days.”
He remembers her performing Sloop John B., an old Bahamian folk song later made famous by the Beach Boys when it was recorded for their 1966 classic Pet Sounds album. Apparently, she sang it with a lisp.
“We said, ‘Oh Christ, this bird is singing again?’ ” Millar says with a laugh.
So, no, Millar did not see future greatness in Joni Anderson, at least not at that point.
“Not a bit,” he says. “It would have blown me down if you had told me at the time she was going to become a superstar in the world of music and writing and all that. I would have been absolutely astounded. You never knew in those heady ’60s days what was going to happen.”
Given the career that awaited her, it’s perhaps not surprising that Joni Mitchell’s days in Calgary have not garnered a lot of attention. Her formidable talents as a songwriter, guitarist and arranger and her involvement in the era-defining L.A. music scene of the late 1960s and early ’70s have made her a towering figure in the history of popular music whose influence cannot be overstated. Mitchell continued to make adventurous records for decades and developed a persona as a stubbornly singular artist who was not hesitant to sing her own praises and criticize her peers. Her romantic relationships with Leonard Cohen, David Crosby, Graham Nash, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Sam Shepard and Larry Klein have been just as well-documented as her artistic output. Her miraculous recovery from a devastating 2015 aneurysm, which included a triumphant return to performing at the 2024 Grammys and a win for Best Folk Album for Joni Mitchell Live at Newport, put her back in the spotlight and only amplified the reverence and fondness for her. So, relatively speaking, her brief stint in Calgary as a ukulele-wielding “two-career girl” could easily be regarded as a minor footnote, unworthy of much consideration from the critics and scholars who have undertaken deep dives into her life, loves and artistry.
Time in Calgary a major influence on Mitchell’s music
But Ann Powers, a longtime music critic for NPR and author of the 2024 book Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell, says Mitchell’s time in Calgary was clearly formative. Sure, part of that is because those years in life are formative for everyone to a certain degree. Like a lot of 20-year-olds, she was making major decisions about what to do with her life. But it went beyond the traditional coming-of-age growing pains. Mitchell, who was born in Fort Macleod but raised in Saskatoon, was not a complete newbie when she began playing earnest folk songs at the Depression. Mathew’s article reveals that her pre-Calgary days included a stint as a resident visual artist at the Louis Riel coffee house in Saskatoon, where she soaked up the “beginnings of the folk music boom” and discovered a love of folk singing that eventually led to her first public performance on Prince Albert’s CKBI-TV. But her time in Calgary, and at the Depression specifically, would have a major influence on her music.
Uren, for one, saw a lot of potential in Mitchell even if the Irish Rovers didn’t. According to David Yaffe’s 2017 biography, Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell, her time in Calgary was not easy, even if it was formative. She only lasted a year in art school. She made ends meet by working as a model.
According to that book, she auditioned for Uren and eventually began playing three sets a night at the Depression, using what she called “a breathy little soprano” to sing a repertoire of English and Scottish ballads with a “handful of sea chanteys and other odds and ends.”
It was in Calgary that she met Brad MacMath, a fellow art school student. Her roommate at the time, another art student named Lorrie Wood who she knew from her days in Saskatoon, told Yaffe that Mitchell was “the only virgin left in art school.” That soon changed. She became pregnant with MacMath’s daughter, who she would later give up for adoption in a decision that would come to light and make headlines decades later. Mitchell eventually moved with MacMath to Toronto, but she may have begun writing what she considers her first real song — Day After Day — during her final months in Calgary. At the very least, it was inspired by her short time in the city. It’s speculated that she may have written the song on the three-day train ride with MacMath to Toronto, which included a stop at the Mariposa Folk Festival. That marked the end of her days in Calgary. She met her first husband, a fellow folkie named Chuck Mitchell in 1965 while in Toronto. They moved to Detroit and the marriage only lasted two years. By 1967, she had moved to California and the rest is well-documented history.
So, yes, while her time in Calgary was brief, Powers says it also had a lasting impact.
“In Calgary, Joni fully entered the folk scene and, in those years, that would have exposed her to a wide variety of styles of music, including blues,” Powers says. “While, musically, Day After Day doesn’t sound like blues, it sounds very much like something by Joan Baez, who was a very major role model for Joni in those years. But it has the heart of the blues. My conjecture was that it was inspired by listening to Freight Train by Elizabeth Cotten, which is a song that influenced her guitar style a lot as well.”
Mitchell had strong opinions on visual arts
On top of that, it would have been in Calgary where she made the life-altering decision to pursue music rather than visual art.
“There is a Joni Mitchell that could have existed if we’re talking in Robert Frost terms of the roads diverging in the yellow wood,” Powers says. “There is a Joni that could have existed who would have put aside her guitar and focused on illustrating and fine art and painting and maybe not stayed in Calgary but never ended up in L.A.”
According to Yaffe’s book, Mitchell held strong opinions on art even at a young age. As a visual artist, she “had little patience for what she saw as the fads and fashions of the Abstract Expressionists and Minimalists. Jackson Pollock just seemed like surface splatter …,” he wrote. Whatever the case, Mitchell continued to paint throughout her life and would eventually exhibit her work. Yaffe quotes her as saying “I sing my sorrow and paint my joy.”
Chris Cran, a renowned Calgary-based visual artist, studied at the Alberta College of Art more than a decade after Mitchell left. But both artists had George Angliss as an instructor. Cran says he remembers Angliss telling him about Mitchell disappearing into the restrooms to practise her ukulele. Whether he was the instructor cited in the Albertan article who encouraged her to give up music for art is unclear. But Thayre Angliss, George’s daughter, says her father considered Mitchell to be a talented painter and “made a point of telling her that she was good.” He considered her a “high talent” who could have easily had a career in visual arts, she says.
Cran is now on the board of governors at the Alberta University of the Arts.
“I keep on saying to the board, ‘Let’s get some show business happening here. I mean, Joni Mitchell went here,’ ” he says. “And people go, ‘Oh yeah, I forgot.’ ”
Mitchell did make a significant return to Calgary when Alberta Ballet’s artistic director Jean Grand-Maitre convinced her to participate in The Fiddle and the Drum, which launched in 2007. It was the first of Grand-Maitre’s seven portrait ballets, which would eventually include projects inspired by the music of k.d. lang, Gordon Lightfoot, the Tragically Hip, Sarah McLachlan, Elton John and David Bowie. Named after a song from Mitchell’s 1969 album Clouds, The Fiddle and the Drum featured the company’s 27 young dancers performing beneath a video installation by Mitchell, with images of some of the songwriter’s latest artworks projected on either side. Mitchell began working with Grand-Maitre in January 2006, which required her to spend extended time in Calgary. When the production closed in 2007, she stayed in Calgary for months to edit the film version of the ballet. The two remain close friends and Grand-Maitre said she would often reminisce about her Calgary days when they were working together. She spoke about her time in art school, telling Grand-Maitre that she never really felt like she fit in with the rest of the students. But while working with Grand-Maitre on the ballet at the Banff Centre for the Arts, she bonded with students there.
“She would play pool every night and all the students would play against her and she would beat them all,” Grand-Maitre says. “They were discreet because most of them were artists so they wouldn’t go and bug her. But every 10 minutes we would go out for a cigarette between pool games and all the students would come out and ask her questions and smoke with her. But she enjoyed being at the Banff Centre very much and she enjoyed being on campus with the students.”
Back in Calgary, Grand-Maitre and Mitchell would take walks in the city. Once, when she was staying at Hotel Arts, the two walked around the corner to 1st Street S.W. and stood outside the building that once housed The Depression coffee house.
“She didn’t recognize it when we were there, but she knew it was nearby,” he says.
Mitchell is currently working with filmmaker Cameron Crowe to develop a drama based on her life that will star Meryl Streep. An email sent to Mitchell’s management requesting her participation in this article was not returned. But Grand-Maitre says Mitchell’s memories of her time in Calgary in the 1960s are very clear.
“When she talks about her years in Alberta, it seems sometimes that she felt like she was a bit lost,” Grand-Maitre says. “She didn’t feel at home at ACAD, she couldn’t feel (a part of) the music industry because it wasn’t her thing yet. And yet the roots were growing deep for this genius and great painter and thinker and writer and composer.
“Those were crucial years for her,” he says. “That’s why she remembers them very clearly because those were the years when she made the most important decisions of her life.”
