Joni’s stolen guitar 😢

 

Joni Mitchell never really got over the loss of her “dear one,” a 1956 D-28 that had been gifted to her after surviving an explosion while it was on a tour of duty in Vietnam with a Marine Captain. “When they cleared the wreckage, all that survived was this guitar,” Mitchell told Acoustic Guitar magazine in 1996. Sometime before the release of her 1974 album, Court and Spark, it was stolen from a baggage carousel in Maui, Hawaii. 

By that time, however, it had already underpinned Mitchell’s rise to pop-folk prominence, featuring on earlier works including “Big Yellow Taxi,” a creative peak from her 1970 album, Ladies of the Canyon. Written during a stay in Hawaii – and inspired by seeing far-off mountains spreading out from beneath the parking lot of her hotel – it fizzes with the playful melodic attitude of her foundational writing.