The Words and Music of Joni Mitchell (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Words and Music of Joni Mitchell Daniel Sonenberg The Words and Music of Joni Mitchell. By James Bennighof. (Praeger Singer-Songwriter Collection.) Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010. [xviii, 213 p. ISBN 9780313355943. $44.95.] Discography, bibliography, index. James Bennighof has added an important new volume to the Praeger Singer-Songwriter Collection, a series that began publication in 2006, and features volumes on such wide-ranging artists as Neil Young, Patti Smith, Ice Cube, and Bennighof 's [End Page 768] own book on Paul Simon. The series' focus is critical and interdisciplinary, its various authors having specializations from across the humanities. Bennighof, a professor of music theory at Baylor University, brings ample harmonic chops to the task, as well a hands-on understandingof Mitchell's unique approach to guitar-based composition. Bennighof's book follows almost immediately on the heels of Lloyd Whitesell's excellent The Music of Joni Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), combining with that earlier text to illuminate the complex, stylistically diverse, and poetically and technically accomplished music of one of the more challenging artists to pin down in the pop sphere. Bennighof sets out, as he explains in his introduction, to analyze all 167 original songs that have appeared on Joni Mitchell's albums over the last 43 years (p. xvi) and he does just that, moving album by album, track by track, from her eponymous debut album in 1968 (Reprise RS 6293, LP, alternately known as Song to a Seagull) to her 2007 collection, Shine (Hear Music HMCD-30457, compact disc). The principal gap this book fills after Whitesell's is consideration of Mitchell's unique system of alternate guitar tuning, which has defined both her style on the instrument and her approaches to harmony and texture over the course of her career. Mitchell, who was struck by polio at an early age and suffered from a weak left hand as a result, developed a technique that would enable her to realize the complex harmonies she heard in her head without needing to contort her digits unreasonably, and this was essentially to retune the guitar for every song. As Bennighof makes clear, Mitchell's guitar-based songwriting begins with the invention of her tuning, and is followed by the discovery of several basic left hand shapes, which she then uses as the harmonic palette of the song. Her tunings are often bold, whether it be the open B-F#-B-F#-B-D# tuning for "Songs to Aging Children Come," in which, as Bennighof explains, "although the top strings are very close to where they would be in a standard tuning, the bottom strings—and especially the sixth string—are strikingly low," (p. 33) or the unusual C5 tuning of "Song to a Seagull," C-G-C-G-C-C. The sustained focus on tuning and fingerings raises the question of the audience for this book, and that is not one whose answer is obvious. In a concise first chapter, Bennighof lays forth the foundations of tonal harmony, starting with the very basic facts: "When a song or other musical composition is said to be in a particular key, the note named fills this role [of tonic]—if a song is in the key of G major, G is the central pitch" (p. 2). By page 7, he is discussing secondary dominants and chromatic mediant relationships. Thus does he traverse three semesters of undergraduate theory in a handful of well-wrought paragraphs. The presence of such a primer, along with the absence of illustrations of any sort (including transcription excerpts and fingering diagrams) would seem to indicate that the general reader is his audience. But such readers are likely to struggle with this consistently technical book, whereas their musically educated counterparts will likely miss visual aids to the narrative. Bennighof begins discussion of each album with some description of the album's cover, followed by a bit of historical context and then a song-by-song parsing of the album's contents. His analyses are concerned with formal layout, rhyme schemes, harmonic progressions and organization, lead vocal melody, guitar tuning, text-music correspondence, and, to a lesser extent, musical texture, and backing...