radiodark
I’m sure I’m late to the game on this, but a Saskatoon DJ recently re-found Joni Mitchell’s earliest recordings in a box of old tapes. It was 1963, and she was 18 and hadn’t yet started writing her own songs. The find gave rise to a box set with some other recordings of the same era, and all together they’re a fascinating insight on her folk music roots, and a boon to a folk nerd like myself.
Picking just the Child examples, here’s Anathea, a Hungarian variant of The Maid Freed From the Gallows (Child 95), likely from Judy Collins’ rendition:
And here’s a live recording of Child 214 The Dowie Dens of Yarrow from a year after that first recording, when she was battling bronchitis:
Lovely and restrained things, they are, by comparison with the splendid ironic depths of her later songwriting, but there’s a through line in the clarity of her vocals and the precise twanging of her guitar. I don’t think I’d ever realized how fully she’d learned her folk musician chops until now.
Mitchell seems to agree: in a press release for the album she wrote;
“The early stuff, I shouldn’t be such a snob against it. A lot of these songs, I just lost them. They fell away. They only exist in these recordings. For so long I rebelled against the term, ‘I was never a folksinger.’ I would get pissed off if they put that label on me. I didn’t think it was a good description of what I was. And then I listened and… it was beautiful. It made me forgive my beginnings.”
Some of them remind me a bit of early Joan Baez’s treatments of the same songs, and I wonder if there was a direct inspiration there or if it’s just their stylings being the product of the same scene at the same time. Beyond Child, there’s lovely American-in-origin songs like John Hardy, Fare Thee Well, Tell Old Bill, Irish tunes like Molly Malone, Nancy Whiskey, and Maids When You’re Young Never Wed an Old Man, and more. Check them out if you’re interested.
