In The Picture

Some of the greatest albums of all time turn 50 years old in 2021 – among them The Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, Led Zeppelin’s fourth, and Joni Mitchell’s Blue. The latter has long been acclaimed as a peak of Joni’s career, and in terms of her guitar playing it was just the beginning of her tuning adventures.

Blue features extraordinary choices: DADAAD on Carey, Open A major 9 (E-A-C#-G#-B-E)

Ab Ab-ab-eb-ab- Eb) on California, and open ( C- on This Flight Tonight. They allowed extended chords that are inaccessible in standard tuning.

Joni resented the ‘folk music’ label; her use of harmony was far more expansive. Despite her complex chords, it wasn’t jazz either—mitchell compared her use of harmony to Debussy. She found beauty in musical tension, balancing dissonant sounds to reflect the complex emotions in her songs. Her fingerstyle technique, developed because she couldn’t play like blues pioneer Elizabeth Cotten, viewed the guitar as an orchestra, treating the top strings like a horn section and the low ones like viola, cello, and bass.

While writing Blue, Joni backpacked around Europe with a dulcimer, an Appalachian folk instrument normally strummed with a quill. Joni instinctively slapped and beat the dulcimer, and when she returned to guitar, she brought this slapping technique with her. 50 years on, Joni’s percussive approach is still reverberating in the techniques of modern slap-n-tap acoustic guitarists.