Before she rewrote the rulebook with Blue and Hejira, Joni Mitchell was a 19-year-old art student with a cheap baritone ukulele, no union card and a day job in women’s wear. She did not even think of herself as a real musician. The way she clawed her way out of that corner – via a Toronto scab club, $15-a-night gigs and a crash course in open tunings – is one of the great origin stories in modern music.
From art-school ukulele to Detroit coffeehouses
In her early twenties Joni still imagined her future in paint, not sound. She went to art school with only six months of self-taught baritone ukulele playing behind her, picking up weekend jobs at a local folk club more to finance cigarettes and travel than to launch a career.
On a train east toward Toronto she wrote her first song, then headed to the Mariposa Folk Festival mainly to see Buffy Sainte-Marie, not to get on stage. Toronto’s folk circuit turned out to be brutal: most Yorkville clubs demanded a musicians’ union card she could not afford, so she took a low-wage job selling women’s clothes and still could not cover rent.
Her lifeline was a non-union “scab” club that let her perform regularly, even without papers. There she toughened up her solo act, soon married American folk singer Chuck Mitchell, and moved to Detroit, where the couple scraped by on $15 sets while hosting a revolving cast of visiting songwriters; it was in that fifth-floor walkup that Eric Andersen showed her open G and a modal drop-D tuning, and she later said that once those open tunings gave her richer chords to play with, her songwriting finally “began to come.”
The baritone ukulele that started it all
Mitchell’s first instrument was not a guitar but a baritone ukulele – the largest. Baritones are tuned like the top four strings of a guitar and sit an octave or more below the tinkly soprano, which makes them feel almost like a shrunken, forgiving acoustic guitar in the hands.
For a young art student with no money, that mattered. The baritone’s short scale length, soft nylon strings and guitar-like tuning let her learn chord shapes and sing over them without fighting steel strings or jumbo frets, quietly setting her up for the guitar revolution that would follow.
Why starting on a uke can still be a secret weapon
If you are coming to music later in life, Joni’s path is a smart blueprint. A baritone uke is easier on aging hands than a full-size guitar, but because the tuning matches guitar’s top four strings, every chord you learn transfers directly if you ever upgrade. You can steal that advantage today without apologizing to any “serious” players.
Breaking into a gatekept folk scene
The 1960s folk revival liked to posture as anti-establishment, yet it policed its own gates ruthlessly. In Toronto’s Yorkville neighborhood, club work was largely reserved for union members, and Joni was too broke and too pregnant to raise the fee; she ended up in a shared house at 504 Huron Street, selling dresses at Simpson-Sears by day and hunting non-union stages at night. Jason Schneider’s research places her first real foothold at the Half Beat, a so-called scab club where she performed regularly, wrote her first song “Day After Day” on the train east, and gradually shifted from traditional material to her own compositions.
She later summed it up starkly: she had begun as a straight folk singer in the Baez/Judy Collins mold, and the moment she started writing, that borrowed vocal style fell away. In other words, the folk “rules” had given her a stage, but breaking those rules gave her a voice.
Why Joni fell in love with open tunings
There is a darker, physical reason Mitchell gravitated to alternative tunings so quickly. Childhood polio left her left hand weakened, and dense first-position folk chords could be physically punishing; by retuning the guitar to open chords she could get big harmonies with simpler shapes. Writers close to her career have argued that this limitation nudged her toward chord voicings that lean more toward jazz colors and quartal harmony than standard folk strumming.
Over time she developed a private universe of tunings, reportedly more than 50 of them, many derived from open-E shapes gradually tuned lower as her voice deepened. By the 1990s she was using a custom Strat-style guitar driving a Roland VG-8 so a technician could switch tunings electronically between songs while the physical strings stayed in standard, a pragmatic solution to a lifetime of harmonic experimentation.
A quick tour of a few Joni-style tunings
For all their mystique, some of Joni’s classic tunings are friendly enough for a weekend player. Open G (D G D G B D), open D (D A D F# A D) and simple drop D (D A D G B E) are all standard folk and blues tools; Mitchell used open-D family tunings (often capoed) for staples like “Both Sides Now,” “Big Yellow Taxi” and “Chelsea Morning,”.
| Tuning | Strings (low to high) | Vibe | Try this |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open G | D G D G B D | Loose, rolling, great for droning bass notes | Strum all open, then barre at 5th and 7th fret for instant Joni-esque progressions |
| Open D | D A D F# A D | Lyrical, piano-like, big wide chords | Pick broken chords and let open strings ring against simple melodies |
| Drop D | D A D G B E | Familiar but heavier low end | Play normal G and A shapes, enjoy the extra depth on the low string |
| Baritone uke standard | D G B E | Guitar-like, intimate and warm | Use basic guitar shapes on four strings for instant campfire chords |
From folk singer to harmonic outlier
It did not take long for those choices to blow her out of the folk pigeonhole. Within a few years she had moved from Calgary and Toronto hootenannies to Detroit coffeehouses, then to New York and Los Angeles, where David Crosby helped secure her a stripped-down deal with Reprise for what became Song to a Seagull, and her songs were already being covered by Judy Collins, Buffy Sainte-Marie and others before most listeners even knew her name.
By the time the wider world caught up with Blue, she was already treating guitar as an orchestra of alternate tunings rather than a strummed folk box. Calling Joni Mitchell a “folk singer” at that point was like calling Thelonious Monk a barroom pianist – technically true, and completely missing the point.
What players can steal from Joni’s origin story
1. Let money constraints shape your sound, not your ambition
Joni’s entire early toolkit was a baritone uke, a cheap acoustic, non-union clubs and borrowed floor space. Instead of waiting until she could afford the “right” gear or high-status rooms, she squeezed everything she could out of what she had. If you own any halfway decent instrument, you already have enough to make something personal.
2. Use alternate tunings to erase bad habits
Mitchell treated each tuning as a new instrument, which meant her fingers could not fall into the same old rock clichés. Retune one string and you are forced to listen first and think theory second, exactly the mindset that gave her those floating, unresolved chords. If your playing feels stale, spinning the tuning pegs a few turns can be more radical than buying another guitar.
3. Host the jam, steal the secrets
The Detroit apartment where she and Chuck Mitchell billeted passing musicians was more than cheap lodging – it was a laboratory. Eric Andersen literally left his tunings behind in that room, and they changed her writing forever. Opening your living room or practice space to other players is still the fastest way to pick up the kind of tricks nobody puts in method books.
4. Ignore the gatekeepers and find your Half Beat
Joni’s breakthrough gigs were not at the chicest Yorkville venues but at a scab club serious folkies sneered at. Every era has its gatekeepers, from unions to algorithms; if they will not let you in, play somewhere else and build your own audience. Authenticity is not about passing someone else’s purity test, it is about doing honest work in whatever room will have you.
5. Let the songs tell you what you are
For a couple of years she thought of herself as a painter who sang folk standards on the side. Once the open tunings and original songs arrived, the music simply refused to stay in that box. If your own writing starts to pull away from the genre label you thought you belonged to, the Joni move is not to rein it in but to follow it and see how strange the chords want to get.
Joni Mitchell did not set out to be a guitar visionary; she set out to survive, get through art school and pay the rent. A baritone ukulele, a scab club, a fifth-floor walkup and a few “wrong” tunings turned that struggle into one of the most distinctive harmonic languages in popular music. The instruments you already own – and the obstacles you are fighting – might be quietly offering you the same deal.
