Joni Mitchell: The Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song (Ken Ehrlich Productions, Library of Congress, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the Rodgers and Hammerstein tribute My Favourite Things on Wednesday, December 31, PBS then showed Joni Mitchell: The Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. My husband Charles, who had returned home from work during the last set of the Rodgers and Hammerstein tribute, joined me to watch the Joni Mitchell tribute. Joni Mitchell (born Roberta Joan Anderson, by the way) is a Canadian-born singer-songwriter and the kind of artist I’ve respected rather than loved. I acknowledge that she’s written some of the greatest songs of the last half of the 20th century, but I’ve never been more than a sporadic fan. Ironically, the music of Joni Mitchell I like best was what she was doing in the middle to late 1970’s, beginning with Court and Spark (1974) and ending with Mingus (1979), when she started working with jazz musicians and incorporating jazz elements into her mostly folk-driven style. I remember grabbing the Mingus album as soon as it came out, and while I was a bit disappointed that she’d used an electric bassist (Jaco Pastorius) instead of an acoustic one given that the album was a tribute to one of the greatest acoustic bassists of all time, I still loved the album even though it wasn’t the direct collaboration both Mitchell and Mingus had intended. Mitchell and Mingus planned to make an album together, and they got as far as co-writing three songs for it (“A Chair in the Sky,” “Sweet Sucker Dance,” and “The Dry Cleaner from Des Moines”) before Mingus died. The final album consisted of those three songs, one old Mingus piece to which Mitchell added new lyrics (“Goodbye Pork-Pie Hat,” Mingus’s tribute to Lester Young), and two new songs Mitchell wrote after Mingus’s death, “God Must Be a Boogie Man” (taken from the opening lines of Mingus’s autobiography, Beneath the Underdog) and “The Wolf That Lives in Lindsey.” “The Wolf That Lives In Lindsey” remains my all-time favorite Joni Mitchell song even though it’s pretty elliptical – more so than many of Mitchell’s songs.

It was ironic that PBS ran a tribute to Joni Mitchell just after they showed one to Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II that had included a sound clip from an archival interview with Hammerstein in which he said that the lyrics of a song need to be as clear-cut and obvious as possible because the listener only gets one chance to hear them and you can’t go back and re-read them the way you can with a printed poem. If there were any great songwriters who proved that you can write deathless songs while keeping the imagery obscure and oblique, Joni Mitchell would be Exhibit B (Bob Dylan would be Exhibit A). Charles noticed that the show was probably a few years old because a surprising number of the audience members were wearing face masks, and the age of the show became quite apparent when the politicians presenting the award to Mitchell were presented – and they included Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House before McCarthy was removed from that position in a palace rebellion in the House Republican Caucus and replaced with Mike Johnson. As it turned out, we could date the show precisely when one of the announcers during the interstitial segments said it had occurred the day before the death of saxophonist Wayne Shorter, who worked with Mitchell on some of her more jazz-influenced albums. Since Shorter died on March 2, 2023, that would date the concert as March 1, 2023. (There’s a clip from Mitchell here inexplicably claiming that Wayne Shorter was the greatest saxophonist who ever lived. He was certainly a great one, but the greatest who ever lived? Not in a universe that included Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, and John Coltrane.) Many of the songs were from Mitchell’s album Blue (1971) – of the 12 songs included, five (“Carey,” “California,” “Blue,” “A Case of You,” and “River”) were from Blue. Mitchell’s songs were frequently about her romantic relationships, including affairs with Graham Nash (whom she’d just broken up with when she recorded Blue) and James Taylor (whom she caught on the rebound after she and Nash split), though there was a brief vacation in Europe she took in early 1970’s. During that trip she met a man named Carey Raditz, who was living in a cave on the southern Greek island of Crete. Raditz taught her to play the four-stringed dulcimer, and she wrote “Carey” as a tribute to him and to show off her skill on that instrument.

“Carey” led off the Gershwin Prize tribute concert, performed by Marcus Mumford of the folk-rock band Mumford and Sons. After that Annie Lennox, looking even more like death warmed over than Mitchell does (Mitchell had a life-threatening brain aneurysm in 2008 and she’s now considerably more heavy-set and less mobile than she was in her glory days, though she fought back and at the 2023 Newport Folk Festival she performed a 13-song set), played Mitchell’s biggest hit, “Both Sides Now.” Actually Judy Collins had the hit version in 1968, and by the time Mitchell herself recorded it on an album called Clouds, it sounded like she was saying, “O.K., you know I wrote this song so I’m going to record it, but I’m pretty bored with it by now.” Lennox slowed it way down and made it sound even more like a dirge for lost years than it did in the late 1960’s, but then time has had that effect on a lot of Mitchell’s age-related musings from her 20’s. After that Angélique Kidjo did a stunning version of “Help Me,” the lead track on Court and Spark and one of Mitchell’s at once exuberant and doubtful love songs. Then James Taylor came out to do a plaintive version of “California” from Blue, and Brandi Carlile – one of my favorite modern-day singers – not only MC’d the show but did a quite beautiful version of “Shine,” the title track from Mitchell’s last studio album of new material in 2007. Its politics were a bit confusing – Mitchell’s lyrics asked us to shine a light on both creative and destructive phenomena – but then, aside from a handful of songs like “Big Yellow Taxi,” Mitchell was not known as a political songwriter the way Joan Baez was. Speaking of “Big Yellow Taxi” – a song which will always remind me of the gig at which I interviewed Anne E. DeChant for Zenger’s Newsmagazine, which took place at the big Borders bookstore in the Gaslamp District; I loved the audacity of DeChant singing Mitchell’s anti-gentrification song in the middle of a monument to gentrification! – it was the next item on the program, performed by Ledisi with help from Lennox, Carlile, Cyndi Lauper, and others. Ledisi introduced it as the sort of song that makes you want to sing along. Then Lauper came on solo for her rendition of “Blue.” Afterwards Graham Nash came out with an acoustic guitar doing, ironically, the song Mitchell wrote about their breakup, “A Case of You,” with the video screens on the backdrop showing photos of them taken during their relationship.

The next artist up was jazz pianist Herbie Hancock playing “River,” another Blue song and the title track of the 2007 album River: The Joni Letters, which he made as a tribute to Mitchell (it consisted entirely of Mitchell’s songs except for Duke Ellington’s “Solitude” and Wayne Shorter’s “Nefertiti,” which he and Hancock had played with Miles Davis in the so-called “Second Great Quintet” of 1964-1968). Hancock played it with singer Corinne Bailey Rae on the River album (with beautiful soprano sax interjections by Shorter), and with Ledisi on the Gershwin prize tribute. Then Diana Krall came out and played the title track from Mitchell’s 1972 album For the Roses, which I remember largely from the argument I had about it with my old high-school friend Michael Goldberg. I thought it was deathly dull, while he acclaimed it as the best album of 1972 (an honor I thought should have gone to David Bowie’s career-making masterpiece, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars). Creem magazine published a loathsome review of For the Roses which was basically an attempt on the basis of each song to guess which L.A. rock scene male Mitchell had been having an affair with when she wrote it. (Later they printed a caricature record label of an alleged Mitchell LP in which each song was called “Crosby,” “Stills,” “Nash,” and “Young,” reflecting the rumor that she’d had sex with all of them, and the label logo was an ejaculating penis.) I’m not sure what I’d think of For the Roses today – fortunately, after it Mitchell made one of her best albums, Court and Spark – but Krall’s creep through its title track made me guess I’d find it as boring in 2026 as I did in 1972. After that it was time for Joni Mitchell to take the stage – I was about to write “in her own defense” – and she startled me by singing, not one of her own songs, but a masterpiece by the namesakes of the award she was there to receive.

The song was “Summertime,” from the opera Porgy and Bess by George Gershwin, DuBose Heyward (author of the novel and play Porgy on which the opera was based), and Ira Gershwin, and she did a beautiful version closely modeled on the famous one Miles Davis recorded in the late 1950’s for a Porgy and Bess album stunningly arranged by Gil Evans. After that Mitchell joined the other singers on stage for “The Circle Game,” another song of mock world-weariness Mitchell wrote in her early 20’s and which, like “Both Sides Now,” comes off quite differently when she’s 79 (her age when this show was taped). Overall, the Joni Mitchell tribute on her winning the Gershwin prize (the other honorees are Paul Simon in 2007, Stevie Wonder in 2008, Paul McCartney in 2009 – nice to know that it’s not limited to Americans – Burt Bacharach and Hal David in 2011, Carole King in 2012, Billy Joel in 2014, Willie Nelson in 2015, Smokey Robinson in 2016, Tony Bennett in 2017 – even though he was a singer and not a songwriter – Gloria and Emilio Estefan in 2019, Garth Brooks in 2020, Lionel Richie – hand me my barf bag – in 2022, and Elton John and Bernie Taupin in 2024 – and why, oh why, has Bob Dylan not won? Do they think his Nobel Prize for Literature is honor enough? And what about Bruce Springsteen?) was stronger than most of these shows, at least partly because her songs are ambiguous enough both musically and lyrically they lend themselves to different interpretations and aren’t tied to their creators’ renditions the way most singer-songwriters’ songs are.