Ten songs written with the skin off — love, leaving, and the long way home, sung so plainly it still stops a room. The record everyone borrows from.
She produced it herself, changed both ends of it after it was mastered, and wrote four of the songs on a dulcimer bought at a folk festival in Big Sur.
The liner credits put a guest on five tracks only. My Old Man, Little Green, Blue, River and The Last Time I Saw Richard are Mitchell alone at the piano or on guitar, and every song alternates between piano, guitar and dulcimer.
Mitchell produced Blue herself, with Henry Lewy engineering at A&M Studios. James Taylor remembered his sessions as just the three of them, with Lewy keeping things simple.
In a trade piece from April 1971, Reprise said the album was first called River and included Urge for Going and Hunter. Mitchell replaced them with All I Want and The Last Time I Saw Richard, which became the record's opening and closing songs.
Mitchell said she took the dulcimer to Europe because it was light enough to backpack with, and that she wrote most of Blue on it. Carey came out of Crete and California out of Paris.
Jonathan Wingate spent years as the spokesman for David Bowie and Sir Bob Geldof before turning to journalism. He writes for The Times, the Daily Telegraph, Mojo and Rolling Stone, and has interviewed everyone from Sir Paul McCartney, Sir George Martin and Robert Plant to Björk, Smokey Robinson and Tony Bennett. A regular voice on BBC television and radio.
He opens every record up — then sits down with the rest of the room to hear it whole.
Fifty-five seats, a chair, a screen and the record, in a small theatre on Heath Street in Hampstead. The station is thirty seconds from the door.
Four of these songs were written on it.
Painter, songwriter, and one of the most borrowed-from voices of the century — who made the record everyone borrows from at twenty-seven.
Roberta Joan Anderson is born on 7 November 1943 in the Canadian prairie town of Fort Macleod.
In 1965 she gives birth to a daughter and places her for adoption, marries the folk singer Chuck Mitchell, and moves with him to Detroit.
David Crosby, who met her at a gig in Florida, brings her to California, persuades Reprise to sign her and produces her debut, Song to a Seagull.
Clouds wins her the Grammy for Best Folk Performance, and in early 1970 she leaves for Europe with a dulcimer.
On 22 June 1971 Reprise releases Blue, ten songs she wrote, sang and produced herself.
Her jazz-touched pop album reaches No. 2 in the US and becomes the biggest commercial success of her career.
She writes words for melodies by Charles Mingus, who dies in January 1979 before the album, made with Jaco Pastorius, Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock, comes out.
She is inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and that spring she is reunited with her daughter, Kilauren.
A brain aneurysm in March 2015 leaves her unable to walk at first, and she has to learn to speak and play again.
On 24 July 2022 she plays a surprise set at the Newport Folk Festival with Brandi Carlile and friends, her first full concert in more than 20 years.
At 80 she wins her tenth Grammy for Joni Mitchell at Newport and, on 4 February 2024, gives her first-ever performance at the ceremony, singing Both Sides, Now.
The year Britain learned to count in new pence, Blue came out on a Tuesday in June.
On 3 January 1971 BBC2 shows Open Forum, the first official Open University programme, and adult students begin learning from home.
On 7 February 1971 Switzerland's male electorate votes by about two to one to give women the vote in federal elections, one of the last countries in Europe to do so.
Carole King releases Tapestry on 10 February 1971, and Joni Mitchell is credited among the backing singers.
On 15 February 1971 Britain abandons pounds, shillings and pence, and each new penny is worth 2.4 old ones.
On 8 March 1971 at Madison Square Garden, Joe Frazier hands Muhammad Ali his first professional defeat on a unanimous 15-round decision.
Marvin Gaye's album comes out on 21 May 1971. Rolling Stone's 2020 list put it at No. 1 and Blue, from the same year, at No. 3.
Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller opens on 24 June 1971, two days after Blue, with Leonard Cohen's songs serving as its soundtrack.
That June, Glastonbury Fair is held at the summer solstice for the first time, with free entry and a new pyramid-shaped stage of scaffolding and plastic sheeting.
Jim Morrison of the Doors, who had moved to Paris that spring to write, is found dead there on 3 July 1971, aged 27.
On 1 August 1971 George Harrison and Ravi Shankar stage two benefit shows at Madison Square Garden for refugees, with proceeds going to UNICEF.
On 15 September 1971 a chartered fishing boat leaves Vancouver to protest a nuclear test at Amchitka, paid for by a 1970 benefit concert where Mitchell and James Taylor played.
In November 1971 Intel launches the 4004, a 2,300-transistor chip it calls the first commercially available microprocessor.
Sleevenotes Nº.001 · Kid A — the house, listening
At the Big Sur Folk Festival, the luthier Joellen Lapidus sells Mitchell a hand-built Appalachian dulcimer for $200 and shows her a rock-style slap strum.
Mitchell stops performing and travels in Europe, carrying a flute and the dulcimer because they were light enough to backpack with.
She spends about two months among the hippies living in the cliff caves at Matala. On 19 April she plays Carey to the American Cary Raditz as a present for his 24th birthday.
From Crete she goes on to Paris, where she writes California on the same dulcimer.
At A&M Studios in Hollywood she demos California and an early A Case of You, whose words differ from the finished song.
With James Taylor, she plays a BBC radio concert at the Paris Theatre in London that includes the new songs California, River and Hunter.
At A&M, with Henry Lewy engineering, she records with a small group: James Taylor, Stephen Stills, Sneaky Pete Kleinow and Russ Kunkel. Takes of River with French horns and Urge for Going with strings are left unused.
The album, until then called River, loses Urge for Going and Hunter. All I Want and The Last Time I Saw Richard take their places.
Reprise issues Blue in a sleeve designed by Gary Burden, built on Tim Considine's Troubadour photograph, tinted a deep cyanotype blue.
Featuring a unique, specially created visual journey via The Screens — developed especially for these nights.
The screen on the night — ten worlds of water and light, every one drawn live.
The album opens on Mitchell's Appalachian dulcimer, with James Taylor on acoustic guitar. The song was a late addition that replaced earlier choices on the running order.
Mitchell sings it alone at the piano, and no other player is credited.
Mitchell sings it alone with acoustic guitar. It is widely understood to be about the daughter she placed for adoption in 1965.
She wrote it in Matala, Crete, for Cary Raditz's 24th birthday. It is played on dulcimer, with Stephen Stills on bass and guitar and Russ Kunkel on drums, and was the album's single, backed with This Flight Tonight.
The title song is Mitchell alone at the piano. It gave the record its name after the working title, River, was dropped.
Written in Paris and demoed in September 1970, it is played on dulcimer with James Taylor on guitar, Sneaky Pete Kleinow on pedal steel and Russ Kunkel on drums.
Mitchell plays acoustic guitar, and Sneaky Pete Kleinow, of the Flying Burrito Brothers, adds pedal steel.
Mitchell plays it alone at the piano, which borrows the tune of Jingle Bells. An unused take with French horns came out in 2021.
It is played on dulcimer with James Taylor on guitar and Russ Kunkel on drums. A September 1970 demo has different words.
The closing song is piano and voice alone, and was the second of the two late additions that changed the record's shape.
In April 1971 Reprise told the trade that the album had originally been titled River, before the title song Blue gave it its name.
Tim Considine, who took the cover photograph, was a child actor best known as Mike, the eldest son in the American sitcom My Three Sons.
To photograph her in the dark Troubadour, Considine says he used a film usually used for dental X-rays.
Considine's original was black and white, and he later said Burden's blue tint made her look hard.
Mitchell first played Carey to Cary Raditz in Matala on 19 April 1970, his 24th birthday, and spelled his name her own way in the title.
In the same year as Blue, Mitchell sang harmony on James Taylor's You've Got a Friend, which went to No. 1 in the US.
Hunter, dropped from Blue at the last minute, had been played at the October 1970 Vancouver benefit that paid for Greenpeace's first voyage. Its studio take was not released until 2021.
Mitchell told Cameron Crowe in 2021 that the first reaction to Blue, mostly from male songwriters, was that she had exposed too much of herself. Kris Kristofferson was among them.
Rolling Stone's 2020 list of the 500 greatest albums ranked Blue third, the highest place for a woman, up from No. 30 in 2003.
In 2017 NPR's Turning the Tables project, voted by nearly 50 women writers, put Blue at No. 1 of the 150 greatest albums made by women.
Blue was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999.
Although River is not a Christmas song, it has become one of the most-recorded songs in her catalogue, with more than a thousand versions logged by her official site, second only to Both Sides, Now.
Blue came out on a Tuesday in June 1971 — two thousand, eight hundred and eighty weeks before this one, to the day. A salon sold out. We heard the story first, then sat in the dark and shared the record whole. By the next morning Cassandra Wilson had died in Jackson, Mississippi, aged 70 — the jazz singer whose Blue Note debut set Joni’s Black Crow beside two Robert Johnson blues and widened what a standard could be. A record fifty-five years old, and it still proved that time is relative. Love is timeless.
Appalachian dulcimer
The sound that haunts Blue is not a guitar. It is a flat little mountain dulcimer Joni bought at the Big Sur folk festival and carried to Crete because it fitted on her back — four of these songs were written on it, in tunings of her own invention. Neal Whitmore (Sigue Sigue Sputnik; Marc Almond’s guitarist for three decades) brings one into the room to open up that obscure, ringing tone underneath the whole album — where it came from, how it is tuned, and why nothing else sounds like it.
Ten worlds, one a track, every one drawn live — no painting, no photograph. For the length of the record the screen was the only light in the room.
Next issue · Nº.004Pink Moon — Nick DrakeTuesday 3rd November · £22 · 55 seats →Researched October 2026. Spot something wrong? Tell us at hello@circleandstar.com.