📍Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada
1954 – 1964“Joni Mitchell was born Roberta Joan Anderson in Fort Macleod, Alberta, in November 1943, and after moving around the prairies with her parents, Bill, a grocery manager and former air force officer, and Myrtle, a teacher, she settled in Saskatoon, a city of bridges on the South Saskatchewan River, which she has always called her hometown. At nine she caught polio and spent weeks in hospital, where she sang Christmas carols so loudly that the boy in the next bed complained, and she discovered she loved to perform. She was a creative, independent girl who loved painting, dancing and rock and roll, and she spent hours exploring the riverbank and the prairie around the city. She studied piano briefly but hated the lessons, and her mother forbade a guitar, so as a teenager she bought a baritone ukulele for 36 dollars and taught herself to play folk songs from records, entertaining friends at parties and around bonfires. She went to Nutana Collegiate and then Aden Bowman Collegiate, where she wrote a fashion column for the school paper and where an English teacher encouraged her to write. In 1962 she waitressed at the Louis Riel Coffee House on Broadway Avenue and played her first paid gigs there. She went on to art college in Calgary and then to Toronto and the United States, becoming one of the greatest songwriters of her time, with albums like Blue. Saskatoon has since named a riverside path the Joni Mitchell Promenade, and in 2018 it placed a plaque at the site of the coffee house where it all began.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today