Joni Mitchell as her 1970s alter ego, “Art Nouveau”
At age 80, Joni Mitchell is belatedly receiving the kind of mainstream accolades that eluded her during her most innovative years of music-making. In the 1970s Mitchell was experimenting across genres with albums like Hejira and The Hissing of Summer Lawns, and in 1979 she released the groundbreaking and sadly overlooked album Mingus, a collaboration with the legendary jazz bassist Charles Mingus, who died during recording.
Mitchell and Mingus in 1978
The album includes Mitchell’s adaptation, with lyrics, of Mingus’s 1959 instrumental “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” a tribute to the great tenor saxophonist Lester Young. Because Mitchell’s lyrical catalogue relies almost entirely on the self-referential, she takes the story of Young’s taboo interracial marriage and contrasts it with the relative freedom of her own personal present:
When Lester took him a wife
Arm and arm went black and white
And some saw red
And drove them from their hotel bed
Love is never easy
It's short of the hope we have for happiness
Bright and sweet
Love is never easy street!
Now we are black and white
Embracing out in the lunatic New York night
It's very unlikely we'll be driven out of town
Or be hung in a tree
That's unlikely!
This music is far more interesting and challenging than Mitchell’s earlier diatonic folk-pop standards like “Both Sides Now,” which she performed to rapturous applause at the 2024 Grammys.
It’s also often ignored that, during her period of genre-breaking experimentations with jazz in the 1970s, Mitchell adopted and appeared publicly as a persona she called “Art Nouveau,” a Black man. On the cover of her 1977 album Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, Mitchell appears, in left foreground, in blackface drag as Nouveau.
In a 2015 interview in New York magazine, Mitchell explained:
. . . that she feels she has a shared identification with black men. “When I see black men sitting, I have a tendency to go — like I nod like I’m a brother. I really feel an affinity because I have experienced being a black guy on several occasions.”
. . . [She relates that] she had to go to a Halloween party, and was trying to think of what to wear, when she saw a guy on Hollywood Boulevard “diddy bopping,” as she puts it, down the street in his blue jogging clothes. She gets up and shows me — an irregular strut, one leg shorter than the other. “And he says, ‘Mmm, mmm, mm, you looking good, sister, you looking good.’ . . . And he kept going and I was trying to imitate his walk. I said, ‘I’m going to go [to the party] as him.’ ” The costume, and the disturbance it caused (“Are you at the right party?”), was such a success she decided to spring it on the guy shooting her album cover . . . [After putting on her Art Nouveau cosplay,] “I walked really showily, going, Heh heh heh.”
It’s worth noting that this interview was published just a few months before another white woman pretending to be Black caused a national scandal. Rachel Dolezal, the president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP, was forced to resign when it was discovered that she was a white woman with no trace of African ancestry.
Rachel Dolezal, before and after
The public shaming of a white person for identifying as Black is especially bizarre in a world where cross-sex identification is celebrated. Why is it that we can seamlessly adopt the persona of the opposite sex, for which there are real biological markers, but not of a different race, for which there are virtually none?
I taught at an Upstate New York community college for nine years, where I created the music department’s only course in African American music history. Before leaving academia, I taught my course for 10 consecutive semesters to hundreds of students across all lines of personal and social identity. My own phenotype is generically-Mediterranean-looking white woman, and in the first week of classes I would often be challenged, generally by a Black male student, about the fact that someone who looked like me was teaching music by and to someone who looked like him. Because racism is not only despicable to me but also absurd, I relished these challenges, usually explaining that the reason I was qualified to teach the class (completely ignoring my scholarly credentials) was that I am an American. As Albert Murray argued in his 1970 book The Omni-Americans, from which I assigned excerpts:
The United States is in actuality not a nation of black people and white people. It is a nation of multi-colored people . . . [American culture] is a composite that is part Yankee, part backwoodsman and Indian, and part Negro . . . By any definition of race, even the most makeshift legal one, most native-born U.S. Negroes, far from being non-white are in fact part-white. … None of this is really news. … And yet it is perhaps the second most persistently overlooked flesh-and-blood fact of everyday life in the United States. The first of course is the all but unmentionable but equally undeniable fact that an infinite and ever-increasing but forever hidden number of assumed white Anglo-Saxon Protestants are among other parts part-Negro.
I began teaching my course before the sorting of people by phenotype that currently regulates most cultural production began, so my explanation was almost always accepted, and by week 2 the challenger was usually firmly on my side.
Nevertheless, there was always some tension in the classroom between students on various issues. Once a white male student was upset by Solange Knowles’s “F.U.B.U.,” because its exclusive Afrocentrism made him feel left out. This led to a lively discussion between the Black and white students, in which everyone emerged as friends.
But a song like “F.U.B.U.” raises all kinds of questions. Who is music for? Can people of one phenotype publicly and unashamedly declare their love for music created by people of a different one? Should people of one phenotype play and perform music created by people of other phenotypes?
Obviously, these questions are laughable. All music is for everyone. Once art has been created, for good or for bad, it’s released into the world for anyone to claim as his or her own.
Joni Mitchell has never repudiated her self-identification with Black men, nor her practice of blacking up to portray one. Her new crop of fans would probably prefer to forget that Art Nouveau ever existed in spite of the ample documentary evidence, including this short 1980 film in which Mitchell recreates her appearance at that long-ago Halloween party.
After all, even blackface that isn’t really blackface has been banned across artistic genres in polite society. No longer is this transformation permissible, for instance:
But, as has been amply documented, American music is a hybrid of African and European musics. Rhiannon Giddens has done laudable work drawing connections among its many musical roots and branches: during lockdown, she and her partner Francesco Turrisi presented a fascinating lecture-demonstration for Carnegie Hall on these topics, which you can watch here. Giddens also plays a replica of a pre-Civil War minstrel banjo, a reified embodiment of the hybrid nature of both America and its music.
All music is for all people. As W.B. Yeats wrote in his 1914 poem “A Coat”:
I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eyes
As though they’d wrought it.
Song, let them take it
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.
There's just so much here! I took a music class in 7th Grade, and we studied Joni Mitchell. After hearing her music, I went straight out and bought her "Ladies of the Canyon" album. I still cherish it. The songs are so penetrating. I felt that Mitchell was speaking directly to me.
All music borrows from previous music. One of my favorite lyrics about this is from Steppenwolf's song, "Tighten Up Your Wig". It is a transparent "rip off" of "Messin' With The Kid" by Junior Wells. The verse goes:
"Just before we go, I'd like to mention Junior Wells;
We stole this song from him, and he from someone else."
There is a similarly strong reaction in the visual arts community against "cultural appropriation". An artist friend of mine (a VERY good painter) wrote about a year back that white folks shouldn't make paintings of black people. Apparently, it's not our story to tell. It's off limits. He was talking about a specific local painter who switched 100% to painting people of color, because those painting sold better. I never had the nerve to ask him what he thought of my portraits of African-Americans.