He was butchering the song. At least Joan Anderson thought so. She was a young musician, just twenty-one years old and starting out in her career. She’d moved to Toronto a few months earlier, attracted by the city’s booming folk scene. The centre of that scene was Yorkville, which had become a magnet for musicians from across the continent; many of the neighbourhood’s creaking old Victorian homes had been transformed into artsy coffee houses. Young people flocked to them, getting buzzed on caffeine, smoking cigarettes, and listening to some of the best music Canada had ever produced. And while she might have been young and new to the city, Joan Anderson had already found a place for herself in the scene. Thanks to her bittersweet folk tunes, she’d become a regular fixture onstage at the Penny Farthing; not yet popular enough to headline the big stage on the main floor, but a nightly guest in the cellar where local artists performed.
That’s where she was on a March night in 1965 — at the Penny Farthing, getting ready to play a set — when a friend caught her attention. “That song you’ve been trying to learn? There’s an American downstairs and he’s singing it.”
It had only been a matter of days since Bob Dylan had released his latest album. There were plenty of landmark tracks on Bringing It All Back Home, but few would prove to be as popular as “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Anderson had already been trying to teach herself how to play it, so when she heard there was a folksinger playing his own cover of the new tune on the Penny Farthing’s main stage, she rushed down to catch the end of the song.
But when she heard it, she was disappointed. Chuck Mitchell was playing his first ever gig outside of his hometown of Detroit, but he was still confident enough to change a few of Dylan’s lyrics. He added some of his own words. And Joan Anderson didn’t care for them at all. Later that night, she told him as much. They’d only just met and they were already fighting. But there was a spark.
It was the beginning of a life-changing romance. They spent the rest of that night together, braving the cold for a stroll through a nearby park before heading back to Anderson’s tiny apartment. Mitchell was tall and sure of himself; Anderson was thin, with long blond hair — famously kind. By the end of their first thirty-six hours together, Mitchell had already proposed.
He was only half-serious when he suggested they should get married, but she quickly said yes. On a June day just a few months after they met, Chuck Mitchell and Joan Anderson found themselves standing in his parents’ backyard in Michigan. She’d made her dress herself, and ones for her bridesmaids, too; she held daisies as she walked up the aisle. “There were trees and birds,” she’d later remember, “and streams and folksingers and baroque trios hiding in the bushes.”
It was intimate and idyllic, but less romantic than it might have seemed. As she walked down the aisle in front of Mitchell’s friends and family, Anderson had major doubts. “I can get out of this,” she told herself. She hadn’t agreed to marry Chuck Mitchell because she was head over heels in love with him. She’d done it to save her daughter.
Before Chuck Mitchell, there was Brad MacMath. Anderson had met him at art school in Calgary; he was a student there, too. She was nineteen years old, living away from home, and ready to try new things. All her friends were already having sex; she figured it was about time she joined them. She might not have been in love with MacMath, but he was nice enough, handsome enough, and there. So, in the spring of 1964, she slept with him.
Months later, she realized she was going to have a baby. “I got pregnant right out of the chute with my friend,” she would later confess. “It was my own stupid fault. That was not even a romance. It was just that I was the only virgin in art school, and I thought, ‘What is this all about?’ And I got caught out and that was bad.”
In the early 1960s, being pregnant and unmarried was still considered to be shockingly scandalous. “That was a terrible thing for a woman,” Anderson remembered, “nothing worse. You may as well have killed somebody.” Worried about what her parents would think back home in Saskatoon, she decided to keep her pregnancy secret for as long as possible. To spare them the humiliation, she would put two thousand kilometres between herself and her parents. She dropped out of art school and headed east, to Toronto.
She had a very good cover story. She was truly disappointed by art school, unmoved by the cold modernism that was all the rage at the time. Disillusioned with her studies, she’d spent more and more time indulging her love of music instead. As a young girl, she’d worn out her stockings dancing to jukebox rock ’n’ roll. Forbidden from buying a guitar, she’d learned to play the ukulele instead, developing a passion for folk music. And now that she was old enough to teach herself guitar, as well, she’d begun to perform at folk clubs — undaunted by a left hand weakened by a childhood case of polio.
When she discovered she was pregnant, she realized her music gave her the perfect excuse to leave school. “I tried to spare my parents,” she explained, “by going to the anonymity of a large city, under the ruse that I wanted to be a musician.” And in 1964, there was no better place in Canada to be a musician than in Yorkville.
In at least one small corner of Toronto, the city was changing. The painfully boring British town that Hemingway so despised was finally beginning its transformation into a vibrant, cosmopolitan metropolis. In the years after the Second World War, Canada had welcomed hundreds of thousands of new arrivals who left the smouldering ruins of their European homelands behind. Many ended up in Yorkville, taking advantage of the low rents charged for the neighbourhood’s crumbling Victorian homes. Some of them opened European-style cafés there, and when they did, they inadvertently sparked a local revolution.
Those coffee houses attracted young people from across the city and beyond. All through the 1960s, those few blocks near Yonge and Bloor were filled with beatniks and hippies, greasers and bikers, potheads and acid freaks, writers, artists, poets, and musicians. The neigh-bourhood became a place where the strange and experimental were welcomed, a safe haven for those who didn’t feel like they fit in anywhere else, who didn’t belong in the conservative “square” culture that had dominated so much of Canada for so long.
And so, when she realized she was pregnant, that’s where Joan Anderson headed.
She arrived in Toronto with only sixty dollars to her name, just enough to pay for a few weeks of rent in a tiny attic. The drafty room made for a miserable home, providing little protection against the icy Canadian winter. Most of the railings from the stairs were missing — they’d been burned by the previous tenants for heat. She’d brought MacMath with her, but he didn’t last very long. He left her pregnant, freezing, and worried about making rent.
It was a rough beginning. Anderson couldn’t afford to join the musicians’ union; her prospects were limited to the few “scab” clubs that welcomed non-union performers. With her money quickly running out, she was forced to get a retail job for a while, working in women’s wear at the Simpson’s department store. She bounced around from her attic to a boarding house to a friend’s place.
But Anderson wasn’t about to give up. She’d written her first original song on the train from Calgary to Toronto, inspired by the rhythms of the wheels. And her talent was obvious; her performances enchanted her audiences. “When she introduced her song,” one of her fellow folksingers explained, “you would lean in and listen. That gorgeous, bell-like voice would take you away.” She landed gigs at church clubs, YMCAs, and some of the most popular coffee houses in Yorkville.
She sang at the Purple Onion (where Buffy Sainte-Marie wrote “Universal Soldier”), at the Bohemian Embassy (where Margaret Atwood read poetry over the hissing cappuccino machine), and at the Village Corner (where Gordon Lightfoot’s folk duo recorded a live album). She became friends with some of the scene’s leading figures: she crashed at the same apartment as Neil Young, introduced him to his bandmate and future pop star Rick James, and lived across the hall from the Ojibwe poet Duke Redbird.
But even there, at the centre of one of the most exciting music scenes on the continent, her pregnancy was a constant worry. “It was a very sad and lonely time for her,” Redbird explained. “I remember Joni being a very private person. I would hear her singing in that beautiful voice of hers, strumming her guitar behind the closed door of her room.” All the while, her belly was growing bigger and bigger. Eventually, she couldn’t even hold her guitar anymore, and was forced to switch to a tiple — a smaller stringed instrument — instead. Her due date was rapidly approaching. Eventually, she had to stop performing altogether.
The baby finally came two weeks later, on a day in the middle of February. Anderson headed to Toronto General Hospital, where she gave birth to a baby girl. As she held her in her arms, she fell deeply in love with the tiny new life she’d created. She named her Kelly Dale Anderson: kelly — an intense, pure green, like the green Canadian countryside in the summer, like her own mother, green with youth.
Joan Anderson was far from the only young woman in Yorkville facing a heart-wrenching decision. In the early 1960s, it was still illegal to sell birth control in Canada; even distributing information about it was technically still banned. Just a couple of years earlier, a Toronto pharmacist had been put on trial for selling condoms, convicted and fined. He was having them shipped from England in bulk, packaging them at his own dining-room table in Forest Hill, and then secretly mailing them out to the people who needed them.
Without easy access to birth control, countless Canadians were getting pregnant who didn’t want to be. Abortion was illegal, too. And in a country where conservative social values were still a powerful force, those who got pregnant out of wedlock faced more than just scandal and ostracism. They also faced a crushing pressure to give up their child. In the first decades after the war, hundreds of thousands of new Canadian mothers were pushed into handing over their babies for adoption. It’s been called the “Baby Scoop Era” (a similar term to the “Sixties Scoop,” which specifically targeted Indigenous mothers).
Seen as “fallen women,” they were told that they were unworthy mothers, that their child would be far better off without them. Doctors, social workers, and religious leaders believed that by going through the trauma of losing their child, women would learn the error of their promiscuous ways. “When she renounces her child for its own good,” as Dr. Marian Hillard of Women’s College Hospital put it, “the unwed mother has learned a lot. She has learned an important human value. She has learned to pay the price of her misdemeanor, and this alone, if punishment is needed, is punishment enough.… We must go back to a primary set of values.” While some mothers, of course, might have made the same decision anyway, many felt like they were being bullied into giving up a child they loved.
Anderson’s stay at the hospital was a deeply painful one — “traumatic,” she would later call it. She had decided to give little Kelly Dale up for adoption. “I have no money,” she told herself. “I have no home. I have no job. When I leave the hospital, I have no roof over my head.” Far from being sympathetic, the hospital staff was cold and severe, clearly judging her harshly for her decision — and for being in that situation in the first place. There were additional tortures, too. After she gave birth, her breasts would be tightly and painfully bound to stop them from producing milk. It was, she said, “barbaric.” In order to spare herself any further pain, she asked that the baby be taken away immediately — holding her newborn daughter would just be too devastating an experience.
But there were complications. The birth hadn’t gone smoothly. So instead of leaving the hospital within a few days, Anderson was stuck there for more than a week. And during that time, she ended up holding Kelly Dale after all — some think it was a mix-up by the hospital staff. And once she held her baby daughter in her arms, Anderson began to have second thoughts. She fell in love with her beautiful, rosy-cheeked child. There, in her hospital bed, she changed her mind.
Instead of giving Kelly Dale up for adoption, Anderson decided she would put her daughter in foster care temporarily. Somehow, she would gather enough money to raise her herself. She put her new plan into action as soon as she was out of the hospital: looking for a job, playing shows, and trying to build the kind of life that would provide a safe and stable home for her daughter. It wasn’t easy, but she was determined. “I kept trying to find some circumstance where I could stay with her,” Anderson remembered.
And then along came Chuck Mitchell.
In the wake of the pregnancy, she landed a regular gig at the Penny Farthing. It stood right in the middle of the scene, on Yorkville Avenue. (The building is still there today, now home to a fashion boutique.) It was one of the best known of all the coffee houses, famous for its backyard pool and bikini-clad servers, where half-naked hippies slathered themselves in colour during a psychedelic “paint-in.” Anderson started playing in the cellar every night, right up until that fateful evening when she met Chuck Mitchell and got into a fight over “Mr. Tambourine Man.”
She did like him. But when he proposed to her just a couple of days into their relationship, the reason she said yes had little to do with love at first sight. Her decision was much more about her new daughter. With a husband, she’d have a better chance of raising Kelly Dale herself. She might have been filled with doubt on her wedding day, but it would all be worth it, if only she could keep her daughter.
The newlyweds made a new home for themselves in Detroit, not just living together but performing together as a folk duo, too. He was older — twenty-nine — and more successful than she was, so for a brief moment it must have seemed as if the new arrangement might work, that it might give her the stability and financial security she needed to get her daughter back.
But they still weren’t making much money. As they travelled between the folk clubs of Michigan and Canada, they couldn’t even afford to stay in hotel rooms. And all the while, the marriage was descending quickly into unhappiness. Mitchell could be condescending and paternalistic. He looked down on Anderson’s Prairie roots. “My husband thought I was stupid because he had a B.A. in literature,” she explained many years later. “He took me on as a trophy wife. He liked my body, but he didn’t like my mind. He was always insulting me.” His sense of humour could be vicious and cutting. “When you don’t wear makeup and you smile,” he told her, ridiculing her big teeth, “you look like a rhesus monkey.” That fight about “Mr. Tambourine Man” was just the beginning. “Chuck Mitchell was my first major exploiter,” she would later claim, “a complete asshole.”
Thoughts of her daughter weighed heavily on her. As they drove from one folk club to the next, there were long silences; sometimes tears. It didn’t take her long to realize her husband didn’t share her vision for their future. While Chuck Mitchell later said he left the decision about the baby up to her, she knew he had no interest in becoming a father to her daughter. “The moment we were married,” she said, “he intimated strongly that he had no interest in raising another man’s child — so I was trapped.”
It was quickly becoming clear her plan wasn’t going to work. The time had come to make her heartbreaking decision. It wasn’t long after their wedding day that the Mitchells took another trip back across the border to Toronto, paying a visit to the foster home where Kelly Dale was being raised. She was a few months old now. Her mother held her in her arms for a final time, saying a sad farewell. And then she signed the adoption papers.
Two years after they met at the Penny Farthing, the folksingers got divorced. But Joan Anderson did get at least one useful thing out of the marriage: a new name. She was now known as Joni Mitchell.
Laurel Canyon winds its way through the hills at the heart of Los Angeles. It’s a land of pale browns and of deep greens, with houses scattered like jewels among the sunny slopes. It’s a place where you can hear a coyote’s howl at night, or a hooting owl … or the chords of an acoustic guitar echoing through the starry sky. By the end of the 1960s, Laurel Canyon had become home to some of the greatest musicians in the world — including Joni Mitchell.
She and her ex-husband weren’t the only ones inspired by “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Just a few weeks after Dylan’s song came out, a new band called The Byrds released their own version. It was a smash hit, racing all the way up to number one on the Billboard charts — more successful than any of Dylan’s songs had ever been before. But The Byrds’ version was very different: they took the acoustic folk tune and turned it into an electric rock song. It was the beginning of an entire new genre, combining the depth of folk music’s poetic lyrics with the energy of rock ’n’ roll. Folk rock was born. Soon, countless other acts were racing to follow in The Byrds’ footsteps. And when the band moved to Laurel Canyon, others did, too. It quickly became the epicentre of the new sound, home to artists like Carole King, The Turtles, Carly Simon, and James Taylor — even members of The Monkees and The Doors lived there.
Joni Mitchell arrived in the spring of 1968. In the year following her divorce, her career had begun to take off — thanks in no small part to The Byrds. The band’s guitarist, David Crosby, had seen her play in New York’s Greenwich Village. “I walked into a coffeehouse and she was singing,” he explained, “and she just floored me. She rocked me back up against the back wall of that place and I stood there just transfixed. I couldn’t believe that there was anybody that good.” Crosby immediately became a champion of her work, producing her first album. And just a few weeks after it came out, she made the move to Laurel Canyon.
She wasn’t the only Toronto musician there. As the sixties came to a close, the Yorkville scene was dying. Toronto might be changing, but many of its residents weren’t comfortable with that change. They were happy with the conservative city they’d always known. As sensationalized stories of sex and drugs filled the newspapers, many Torontonians wanted the hippies driven out of the neighbourhood. Among the many complaints were objections to public displays of affection and interracial couples kissing on street corners. Some wanted the hippies rounded up and sent off to work camps. A doctor interviewed by the Toronto Daily Star suggested they should be kept behind bars at the Riverdale Zoo. One provincial politician — former Toronto Maple Leafs hockey player Syl Apps — declared that Yorkville was “a festering sore in the middle of the city” that had to be “eradicated.” City hall began to actively suppress the Yorkville scene, introducing new bylaws and regulations. There were police crackdowns. Real estate developers moved in. One coffee house after another fell under the wrecking ball. As Yorkville was transformed yet again — this time into a fancy shopping district — many of its most creative young people would spread out across the rest of the city, starting new scenes in new neighbour-hoods, helping turn Toronto into a more exciting and artistic place in the process.
But by then, many of the city’s most promising musicians were already gone. There just wasn’t enough support for the music industry in Canada. There weren’t enough record labels, recording studios, or airtime. The Canadian content regulations ensuring that Canadian artists get played on Canadian airwaves wouldn’t be introduced until 1971. If a Canadian musician wanted to find success, it helped to leave Canada behind.
Many of Yorkville’s biggest stars soon found themselves in Laurel Canyon — just a few minutes’ drive from the biggest record labels in the world. Mitchell’s old friend Neil Young was there. He’d driven straight to L.A. from Toronto and immediately started a new band: Buffalo Springfield. By the end of that month, they were opening for The Byrds on tour. After they broke up, Young would join another new group: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young featured Joni Mitchell’s old producer David Crosby and her new boyfriend, Graham Nash.
Denny Doherty had played the coffee houses of Yorkville in a folk trio called the Halifax Three. But he was now part of a folk-pop quartet called The Mamas & the Papas. His house played host to some of the most debauched parties in the canyon.
The Hawks had been one of the most exciting rock bands in Toronto, playing the rough-and-tumble taverns of the Yonge Street Strip. But they changed their name when they shot to fame as Bob Dylan’s new backing group. Now, they were calling themselves The Band and were recording their debut album just over the hill, at Sammy Davis Jr.’s house.
Jack London & The Sparrows had changed names since their Toronto days, too. They were going by Steppenwolf, now, writing songs like “Born to Be Wild” and “Magic Carpet Ride.” When Mitchell’s neighbour’s house burned down, they showed up with a photographer, grabbing a photo in the charred ruins for the cover of their next album.
But there was no one in Laurel Canyon quite like Joni Mitchell. Her music had evolved in the years since she dropped out of art school. The folk songs she’d been writing since that train ride to Toronto now incorporated new influences: not only a bit of California rock ’n’ roll, but the jazz sounds she’d picked up during her time in Detroit. Her songs were complex and unusual; she adopted strange guitar tunings that gave them a unique, otherworldly quality. Her voice was delicate but powerful, soaring into the clouds before plunging into the depths. Her lyrics were personal and poetic, as intimate as they were mysterious. And they were often filled with hidden messages for her lost daughter.
Over the next few years, those songs would make Joni Mitchell a superstar. Her most celebrated album, Blue, was filled with songs of love and loss: of her crumbling relationship with Graham Nash; of her fling with a hippie living in a cave on Crete; of her new romance with James Taylor. And one of the most powerful songs of them all was a tune called “Little Green.”
She’d written it many years earlier, not long after that heartbreaking visit to the foster home in Toronto, when she said goodbye to her daughter for the last time. When the song was released, the lyrics left some reviewers baffled. Rolling Stone complained they were “dressed up in such cryptic references that it passeth all understanding.” But once you know the story behind it, the song describes her sorrow in surprisingly honest terms.
The lyrics of “Little Green” include references to everything from Brad MacMath leaving her freezing and alone in Yorkville, to being a young mother hiding the truth from her parents back home in Saskatchewan, to the day she gave her baby up for adoption.
Blue helped make Joni Mitchell one of the most successful musicians on the planet. Her songs were being heard by millions. But even as her fame grew, she was haunted by heart-rending questions: What was her daughter like? What kind of life was she leading? What had happened to her Little Green?
Kelly Dale Anderson grew up as Kilauren Gibb, raised by her adoptive parents: teachers who lived in Don Mills. It was a comfortable childhood. They were successful enough to be members of the prestigious Donalda Golf & Country Club; to send her to the private, all-girls Bishop Strachan School; and to take a tropical vacation every Christmas. She grew up to become a fashion model, gifted with her mother’s striking looks. Some friends at the country club had always wondered whether she might be adopted, but her parents denied it. They’d even hidden away their son’s baby photos so Kilauren wouldn’t wonder where hers were. She was twenty-seven years old and pregnant with her own child before they finally told her the truth. The revelation sparked a five-year search for her birth mother.
She didn’t have much to go on. She was eventually allowed to access some government records, but they only contained a few scraps of information: that her mother was originally from Saskatchewan, came from a northern European background, and had polio as a child. But there was one clue in particular that would prove to be intriguing: “Mother left Canada for U.S. to pursue career as folk singer.”
Still, it would take a remarkable coincidence for everything to come together. Gibb had an old friend who was also adopted; he volunteered for the Children’s Aid Foundation, helping bring adopted children together with their birth parents. When Gibb finally got her scraps of information from the government after years of waiting, she called him to let him know. The news was exciting enough that he repeated the words to himself out loud on the phone: “Your mother was from a small town in Saskatchewan and left for the U.S. to pursue her career as a folk singer.”
His girlfriend, Annie Mandlsohn, was in the room. She overheard him.
Years earlier, Mandlsohn had been a grad student at York University, where she became friends with another, older student: Duke Redbird. The poet shared some stories with her from his Yorkville days, including a secret from the winter of 1964: “Never tell this to anybody, but I lived in the same house as Joni Mitchell; she had a baby and nobody knows.” Nearly a decade later, as she listened to her boyfriend describe Kilauren Gibb’s birth mother, it all suddenly clicked. She grabbed the phone.
“Your mother is Joni Mitchell!”
By then, Mitchell had launched her own search. After decades of keeping her painful secret, she’d gone public with her story: when a tabloid tried to catch her out during an interview, she simply responded honestly. She’d been making oblique references to her daughter in her songs ever since the day she’d given her up. Now, she could actively try to find her. Once word got out, her managers’ office in Vancouver was inundated with phone calls: women who’d never known their own birth mothers hoped they might be the daughter of the famous folksinger.
Gibb was becoming ever more convinced. All the details in her file matched. The dates matched. She even looked a bit like Joni Mitchell, with her high cheekbones and blond hair. The more she learned, the more it seemed true: she really was Joni Mitchell’s daughter.
Nothing about the reunion would be simple. Even getting through to her was a major challenge. She emailed Mitchell’s managers for weeks on end, had to mail them her information, and then follow up every day by phone before they finally believed her. And even after they did meet, there would be rough days ahead; they were two strong-willed women sharing a complicated, emotional past. They didn’t always get along. There were heated fights to come. But there would also be beautiful moments, moments like the ones they’d long dreamed of sharing.
It was on a March day in 1997 that Kilauren Gibb found herself on a plane, her young son at her side, flying to Los Angeles. They were picked up at the airport by a limousine, driven into the same hills where Joni Mitchell had first become famous so many years earlier. She lived in Bel Air now, still just a few kilometres from Laurel Canyon, in an old Spanish-style villa, the walls covered in her paintings, a courtyard at its heart. As the evening’s darkness gathered, Gibb walked up to the front door, rang the doorbell, and waited.
And then, the moment arrived. “I heard a voice coming from above,” Gibb remembered, “looked up, and there she was, like Juliet on her balcony.”
Thirty-two years after Joni Mitchell held her baby in her arms for the last time, she had finally found her Little Green. She rushed downstairs to let her in.