An Awkward Original

As I ate my eggs this morning at a ­neighbourhood breakfast joint, almost every song playing in the background could have been mistaken in its early bars for a Joni Mitchell song: high strummed strings and thoughtful piano progressions, and a woman’s voice speak-singing in intimate tones about first-person matters of the heart.

Mitchell was far from the first woman to find fame writing and performing her own pop music. For that you would have to look back to some of the female blues singers such as Bessie Smith, to chanteuses such as Edith Piaf and to pop and country icons such as Peggy Lee. But the Saskatchewan-raised singer was the woman who made the boldest pitch to take up the gauntlet of Bob Dylan’s redefinition of the singer-songwriter role, coming out of the 1960s folk revival, and, in so doing, set a precedent that at least subliminally guided hordes who followed.