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В“So I entered the bad girlsВ’ trail,В” she recalls in the 2003 documentary В“Joni Mitchell: Woman of Heart and Mind.В” But she has also equated this supposed fallenness with the arrival of her songs, which, after putting her newborn daughter up for adoption, began to pour out of her as a kind of postlapsarian poetry.

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Free in that way that only men can be, the friend split for California (В“hearing that everything was warmer thereВ”) Joni stayed and gave birth alone in the frigid Canadian winter. She didnВ’t yet have her own guitar, so she played a four-string baritone ukulele.ДЄt the time of the collectionВ’s earliest live performance, though, in October 1964, she had a secret: She was pregnant with a friendВ’s child.

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In the early 1960s, when Joan Anderson was a neatly coifed Canadian art student, the folk revival was in full swing, but most musicians still performed traditional songs, like the ones Harry Smith collected on his influential 1952 в€єnthology of American Folk Music.В” In keeping with the times, the first disc finds a 19-year-old Mitchell covering old murder ballads (В“John HardyВ”) and Woody Guthrie-approved minersВ’ laments (в€Ѕark as a DungeonВ”). Now, this five-disc collection culled from the years before her 1968 debut album, В“Song to a Seagull,В” maps the precise topography of the cliff from which Mitchell leapt and took flight.

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When she finally came into her powers, Mitchell would interrogate a question no less ambitious than what it meant to live freely as a human unbound by the demands of tradition and convention В— whether as a woman seeking sexual and professional equanimity in a manВ’s world an artist expressing her true self in a trend-crazed and increasingly corporate music industry or a child of nature worried that modernity was taking us too far from the garden.ДЄ strident perfectionist and curator of her art, Mitchell has in the past been dismissive of her earliest music, calling it the work of a В“competent mimicВ” and even В“a squeaky girl on helium.В” But revisiting some of these archival recordings and performances made her В“forgiveВ” her beginnings, she says in the liner notes. It would be more than a decade before she wrote her first В“realВ” song, the folksy ballad в€Ѕay After Day.В” But that defiant early moment began one of the most restlessly daring trajectories in popular music.

She realized, В“I didnВ’t have any masters I wanted to follow.В” The young Joan Anderson retorted, В“Well, the masters had to play by ear to come up with that stuff.В” That was her last piano lesson. В“She said, В‘Why would you play by ear when you can have the masters under your fingers?В’В” В“I played it for my piano teacher, who slapped me across the wrist with a ruler for playing by ear,В” Mitchell, now 76, continues. She was around 7, and the tune was called В“Robin WalkВ” В— В“it was real bouncy,В” she remembers in a spirited interview with Cameron Crowe for the liner notes of her new archival collection, В“Joni Mitchell Archives В— Vol. The story of why Joni Mitchell quit piano lessons is also the story of how Joni Mitchell wrote her first song.

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