The Wary Adoption

It would be easy to dismiss this song as a snapshot of gypset life, circa 1960s, but a closer look reveals so much more:

Trina wears her wampum beads
She fills her drawing book with line
Sewing lace on widows' weeds
And filigree on leaf and vine
Vine and leaf are filigree
And her coat's a secondhand one

As a writer, a painter, a musician, Joni Mitchell, who wrote these words, could also be described as a trained observer. But is that all she's doing here?

Annie sits you down to eat
She always makes you welcome in
Cats and babies 'round her feet
And all are fat and none are thin
None are thin and all are fat
She may bake some brownies today

That she's close enough to see a textile artisan further embellishing the design of a fabric by sewing "filigree on leaf and vine"; around long enough to hear that the resident earth mother "may bake some brownies today", tells us that Mitchell is not just a visitor. These are the quotidian intimacies of home, and these homemakers feel relaxed enough around Mitchell to let her partake in them.

At this point in her life, Joni Mitchell had been a long-time resident of California's Laurel Canyon, but she's not talking about the old familiar. She sings:

Come out for a visit here
To be a lady of the canyon

and it's an invitation she issues just after describing the most private, the most interior-looking canyon lady of the set:

Estrella circus girl
Comes wrapped in songs and gypsy shawls
Songs like tiny hammers hurled
At beveled mirrors in empty halls
Empty halls and beveled mirrors
Sailing seas and climbing banyans

This is not the presumptuous, easy intimacy that visitors and other newcomers often mistake for California casual. This is adoption, instantaneous and all-encompassing, by women for whom sensing kindred spirits is an act of self-preservation. Only on TV would anyone make these private moments public for the sake of putting on a show:

Trina takes her paints and her threads
And she weaves a pattern all her own
Annie bakes her cakes and her breads
And she gathers flowers for her home
For her home she gathers flowers
And Estrella dear companion
Colors up the sunshine hours
Pouring music down the canyon

This is Joni Mitchell with "Ladies Of the Canyon".