Joni Mitchell Bio: I Learned Something!
I thought I knew practically everything about old Horse Face. Nope. In David Yaffe’s new biography of Joni Mitchell, I learned that in an interview with Gene Shay for the “Folklore Program†broadcast on March 12, 1967, Joni Mitchell revealed the improbable origins of one of her best-known and most frequently covered songs: ‘I was reading a book, and I haven’t finished it yet, called Henderson the Rain King. And there’s a line in it that I especially got hung up on that was about when he was flying to Africa and searching for something, he said that in an age when people could look up and down at clouds, they shouldn’t be afraid to die. And so I got this idea “from both sides now.‒
