Joni Mitchell

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Canadian-American folk singer who was inducted into Canada's Juno Hall of Fame on 2/05/1981. She originally taught herself ukulele at age 13 and soon began singing and playing at local coffee houses. She wrote her first song, a blues number, on the way to perform at the Mariposa folk Festival in Ontario in 1964. Connecting with a manager in 1967, Mitchell moved to Los Angeles to cut her first album and, over the next decade, became a polished pro with live concerts, tours, records, clubs and TV; by 1977 she had seven gold albums. As a young performer in Toronto, she fell in love with a fellow student, Brad McMath, and got pregnant. It was unthinkable and scandalous to have become pregnant at that time, and because she was dirt-poor, she gave the baby up when it was born on 2/19/1965 (some accounts give 1966). She married fellow folk singer Chuck Mitchell in June 1965 and they moved to Detroit prior to the marriage breaking up. Some years later, on 11/21/1982, she married her bassist, Larry Klein, in Malibu, CA. Mitchell never had another child and began searching for the baby she had given up. Her daughter, Kilauren Gibb, was also looking for her birth mother and eventually they found each other. They first met by phone, then in person on 3/13/1997, Bel Air, CA. In the '90s, her painting has taken priority as her main interest, and she has exhibited at the Broadgate Centre in London. Link to Wikipedia biography