Covered in Folk: Joni Mitchell
(17 Singer-songwriter covers from countrygrass to indiefolk!)
June 13th, 2009 — 08:16 pm
Joni Mitchell‘s early influence on her peers is part of the mythos of her era, and their support a major factor in her future success; it’s telling that David Crosby, Fairport Convention, Tom Rush, Judy Collins, Buffy St. Marie, and Judy Collins all thought enough of Joni’s songwriting to cover her work long before she won the Grammy for Best Folk Performance in 1970 — or indeed, in many cases, before she had a chance to record those songs herself.
But though Joni Mitchell’s emergence is often lumped in with the transformation of folk into a mass and popular musical form in the American seventies, her impact on what folk music would become is more than just that of the crowd. For while traditional folk songs generally tell third-persona narratives, and though earlier singer-songwriters such as Bob Dylan or Sandy Denny often use the self as a narrator and observer of the universe, it is Joni who is generally thought of as introducing feelings themselves as the primary subject in song.
Whether or not she was truly the first to take this approach, Joni’s establishment of the confessional in folk music is unparalleled. Her explicit exploration of the inner emotional core — those conflicted, inward-looking lyrics, so powerful that they seem to be constantly on the verge of overwhelming the singer’s soft, soaring vocalization of them — did more to create the sense of modern folk music as intimately about the self, longing and faults and all. And the universalization of those emotions defined new ways in which folk music could connect artists and the cultures which they spoke to. Where previous folk music had evoked through narrative and metaphor, Joni’s music strung a direct line from emotional core to emotional core, from her lips to our hearts.
If Joni is over-covered — and certainly her songs are at least as familiar in the mouths and hands of other artists as any female singer-songwriter I can think of — it is because her deceptively plain lyrical poetry has resonated with subsequent generations of musicians struggling with their own voices and emotions, just as it has with her fans. And as singer-songwriter folk music has continued to trend towards the confessional and the local since Joni’s best-known albums have become such staples of the folk canon — the folk imagery and narrative of Clouds, the starkly personal inner darkness and jazztones of Blue, the almost cheerful pop voices of acceptance and celebration in Court and Spark — the covers just keep coming.
I’ve long been a fan of Joni’s — in fact, one of our very first Single Song Sundays here at Cover Lay Down featured an exploration of River, which has become a part of the melancholy side of the holiday canon. Today, we take a broader look at her influence, through some sweet, mostly lesser-known tributes to the seminal singer-songwriter who helped us see that folk doesn’t need to dance around the inner truth to reach every heart and soul.
- Natalie Merchant: All I Want
(from the Wonder UK single, 1995; more Natalie here)
- Angus Stone: River
(from No Man’s Woman, 2007; more Angus here)
- Mark Erelli: A Case of You
(live, via Mark Erelli’s Mp3 of the Month series) - k.d. lang: A Case of You
(from Hymns of the 49th Parallel, 2004)
- Cyndi Lauper: Carey
(from a live Joni Mitchell tribute, 2000; more Cyndi here)
- Alicia Wiley: Little Green
(from Before the Goldrush, 2008; more Alicia here)
- Cat Power: Blue
(from Jukebox, 2008)
- Kristen Vigard: Man from Mars
(from the Grace Of My Heart soundtrack, 1996; more Kristen here)
- Bonnie Raitt: That Song About the Midway
(from Streetlights, 1974) - Dave Van Ronk: That Song About the Midway
(from Sunday Street, 1976)
- Darrell Scott: Urge for Going
(from Modern Hymns, 2008) - Mary Black: Urge for Going
(from Babes in the Wood, 1991)
- Eva Cassidy: Woodstock
(from Time After Time, 2000)
- Karan Casey: The Fiddle and the Drum
(from Ships in the Forest, 2008)
- Marian Call: Chelsea Morning
(from Vanilla, 2007)
- Adrienne Young & Little Sadie: Free Man in Paris
(from Room to Grow, 2007) - Sufjan Stevens: Free Man in Paris
(from A Tribute to Joni Mitchell, 2007)
As always, folks, Cover Lay Down exists to support artists, and the best way to do that is to buy direct from the artists themselves wherever possible. Joni’s work is available everywhere, and if you don’t have at least the aforementioned disks you really should, but all links above lead directly to label- and artist-sanctioned stores and purchase sources; follow ‘em to hear more of what you love. And don’t forget to pre-order Jay Brannan’s new CD to hear his incredible cover of All I Want.
Previously on Cover Lay Down:
- Tom Rush covers Urge for Going
- More covers of Joni’s River from Lex Land and Amy Kuney, and a stream from Rosie Thomas
Special thanks to fellow coverblogger quietcore of Blowin’ Your Cover, who first posted the Natalie Merchant and Cat Powers covers above way back in January of last year.