(Credits: Far Out / Press)
Sun 28 September 2025 18:45, UK
Polio, despite the best efforts of the US Department of Health, is a disease which is now largely resigned to the history books in North America, but the infection ravaged vast swathes of the population back in the 20th century, claiming the lives of countless children in the process, and forever changing the lives of people like Joni Mitchell.
One of the most uniquely beloved voices of the 20th century, the importance of Joni Mitchell is difficult to truly overstate. Soundtracking the counterculture age and singer-songwriter boom of the 1960s, Mitchell’s distinctive voice spoke directly to the hearts of millions, and although the North American music scene of her heyday was practically bursting with socially-conscious hippie strumming acoustic guitars, Mitchell always seemed to rise to the top of the pile, and quite rightly, too.
It is difficult to imagine a musical world without the timeless tones of Joni Mitchell, but her flame was very nearly snuffed out before it had a chance to ignite. Growing up in the sleepy surroundings of rural Alberta back in the 1950s, Mitchell was swept up in a particularly vicious wave of polio infection sweeping the length and breadth of Canada at that time, and the disease came very close to claiming the life of the then-nine-year-old future songwriting star.
Quarantined in a hospital for months on end, the young Mitchell was instructed not to move at all, for fear that it could make the infection even worse. Aside from the obvious mental trauma caused by being locked away in a cold, grey hospital for many months at such a young, formative age in her human development, that horrific quarantine experience left Mitchell unable to walk, and with limited motion in her left hand.
In that same situation, a lot of people would – understandably – throw in the towel, but then Mitchell has never been like everybody else. Instead, she dedicated herself to learning how to walk again, promptly using her newfound motor skills to enjoy all the fruits of the emerging rock ‘n’ roll scene during her youth. “When I got [my legs] back, I rock ‘n’ roll danced my way through my teens,” she later shared in a 1994 interview with Mojo magazine.
When something is taken away from you, you tend to appreciate it more when it returns, and Mitchell was determined to make the most of what was so cruelly stripped away from her at the hands of polio infection. In fact, the songwriter once declared that those many months spent cooped up in hospital “made me have an inner life and made an artist out of me”. Contrary to snuffing Mitchell out, polio seemed to create a kind of artistic rebirth in her mind, and that drive only increased as the years went by.
Not only did polio provide Mitchell a newfound sense of purpose and motivation, but it also played an intrinsic part in how the songwriter performed, particularly during those early years. Given that her left hand was affected by the disease, she struggled to play the guitar in the same way that her contemporaries were doing, and therein lies the origins of Mitchell’s unique playing style and adoption of unusual chords – something which always set her apart from the rest of the increasingly over-saturated singer-songwriter scene of the 1960s.
Mitchell’s outright refusal to let polio infection derail the entirety of her youth, or her artistic desires, is indicative of the kind of artistic drive which has made her a generation-defying talent, still beloved to this day by audiences across the musical spectrum for her distinctive voice and endlessly emotive output.
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