Joni Mitchell turns 83 on Saturday, November 7. She was born Roberta Joan Anderson that day in 1943 in Fort Macleod, Alberta, and this has been one of the busiest years of her life. She accepted a Lifetime Achievement Juno in Canada in March, picked up a Grammy in February, became an American citizen in October, and this week released NEWS, a book built around 23 of her paintings, according to her official website.
For most of her career, though, the most important story of Joni Mitchell’s life was one she told almost no one. In 1965, long before “Big Yellow Taxi” or Blue, a struggling young folk singer gave birth to a baby girl in Toronto and gave her up. It would be 32 years before mother and daughter saw each other again, and a song most of her fans knew by heart had been about that little girl all along.
Why Did Joni Mitchell Give Up Her Baby?
She was 21, broke and alone. The father, an art-school boyfriend named Brad MacMath, was gone before the baby arrived, and she hadn’t told her parents she was pregnant, according to Maclean’s and Time, which both reported the story in 1997. Her daughter, Kelly Dale Anderson, was born in a Toronto hospital on February 19, 1965. Around that time Joni married folk singer Chuck Mitchell, who was not the baby’s father, in what was later described as a marriage of convenience, and the couple decided to place the baby for adoption.
The little girl went to David and Ida Gibb, a Toronto couple who renamed her Kilauren. Joni later explained the choice in the plainest words she could find. “I was dirt poor,” she told Toronto’s Globe and Mail in 1998. “An unhappy mother does not raise a happy child.” She went on to fame in America and kept the secret for nearly 30 years, but she had already written it into her music.
What Song Did Joni Mitchell Write About Her Daughter?
In 1966 she wrote “Little Green,” a tender song to a child she had let go, and released it in 1971 on Blue, the album many critics call her masterpiece. For more than two decades, listeners heard it without understanding who it was for, as both The New Yorker and Far Out Magazine have since recounted.
The truth came out the hard way. In 1993, an art-school roommate from the 1960s sold the story to a tabloid, according to the Los Angeles Times and People. Rather than hide, Joni began to talk about it, and by the fall of 1996 she was publicly asking for help finding her daughter. By then, on the other side of Toronto, that daughter had already started looking for her.
How Did Kilauren Gibb Find Joni Mitchell?
Kilauren learned she had been adopted when she was 27 and pregnant with her first child, and she spent about five years searching. Records from Toronto’s Children’s Aid Society described her birth mother only as a successful Canadian folk singer. In February 1997, she found a fan-run website about Joni Mitchell, counted 14 points that matched her own records, and called Mitchell’s manager, as Reuters and the Western Report reported that spring. “The more I read, the more I realized how alike we were,” she told Reuters.
On March 13, 1997, Kilauren flew to Los Angeles and stayed at Joni’s home for 19 days, according to Maclean’s and Reuters. The first message Joni left her said everything. “Hi, it’s Joni. Please call me. I’m here. I’m overwhelmed,” she recalled to the National Post in 2001. What happened when they finally met is the part both of them never stopped talking about.
The Reunion Joni Mitchell Called The Peak Of Her Life
Joni described the reunion as “the peak experience of my life” to the Western Report in 1997, and years later her feelings had not dimmed. “I’ve had pain and joy in my life but nothing like this,” she told the National Post, calling it “an unparalleled emotional feeling.” In one stroke she had gained a daughter and a little grandson, Marlin. “Kilauren and I get to watch him grow up now,” she told Time. A granddaughter, Daisy, followed in 1999.
Like many families reunited after a lifetime apart, they had difficult stretches, and the Toronto Star reported in 2013 that the relationship had been strained for a time. But the woman who spent 32 years wondering about her mother has always described what that first meeting meant in the same simple words. “It made me feel whole,” Kilauren told both Reuters and the National Post. “It made me feel complete.”
Joni has had her own long road back since then. A brain aneurysm in 2015 forced her to learn to walk and talk again, a journey our story on her rare comments about her health covers. Then she surprised the world by returning to the stage at the Newport Folk Festival in 2022. The young mother who once felt she had nothing to give a child turns 83 this week as a grandmother, still painting, still making music, and still singing the song she wrote for the daughter who found her.
