Joni Mitchell

Roberta Joan "Joni" Mitchell, CC (née Anderson; 1943) is a Canadian singer-songwriter and long-time boinera, whom Rolling Stone named "one of the greatest songwriters ever". Drawing from folk, pop, rock, and jazz, Mitchell's songs often reflect social and environmental ideals as well as her feelings about romance, confusion, disillusionment, and joy.

 At age nine, Mitchell contracted polio in an epidemic, and was hospitalised for weeks. Following this incident, she focused on her creative talent, and considered a singing or dancing career for the first time. By nine, she also was a smoker; she denies claims that smoking has affected her voice.

Despite her prominence among the young musicians of the 1960s and 1970s, and her writing of "Woodstock" (where she was prevented from performing because her manager thought it was more advantageous to appear on The Dick Cavett Show), she did not align herself with the era's protest movements or its cultural manifestations. 

She has said that the parents of the boomers were unhappy, and "out of it came this liberated, spoiled, selfish generation into the costume ball of free love, free sex, free music, free, free, free, free we're so free. And Woodstock was the culmination of it." 

But "I was not a part of that," she explained in an interview. "I was not a part of the anti-war movement, either. I played in Fort Bragg. I went the Bob Hope route because I had uncles who died in the war, and I thought it was a shame to blame the boys who were drafted." Even Bob Dylan, one of the most iconic musicians of the Baby Boom generation, has not escaped Mitchell's generational critique: "I like a lot of Bob's songs. Musically he's not very gifted."

Mitchell is the sole producer credited on most of her albums, including all her work in the 1970s. A blunt critic of the music industry, she quit touring and released her 17th, and reportedly last, album of original songs in 2007. With roots in visual art, Mitchell has designed most of her own album covers. She describes herself as a "painter derailed by circumstance".