Skip to main content

How Joni Mitchell’s Song of Heartbreak, “River,” Became a Christmas Classic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnuULUvTTxk

From Elvis’ “Blue Christmas” to Tom Waits’ “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis” to the Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York,” the most honest Christmas songs freely acknowledge the holiday’s dark underbelly. There are always those for whom the holidays are times of heartbreak, which, as we know, makes for better songwriting than tinsel, elves, and stockings. Near the top of any list of miserable Christmas songs sits Joni Mitchell’s holiday classic “River,” in which she laments losing “the best baby I ever had” over the season.

“River” is not really a Christmas song; it just happens to be set during the holidays: “It’s coming on Christmas, they’re cutting down trees,” Joni sings, “They’re putting up reindeer, singing songs of joy and peace.” This tranquil scene provides a tragic foil for the song’s true subject. “Ultimately,” writes J. Freedom du Lac at The Washington Post, “‘River’ is a bereft song about a broken romance and a woman who desperately wants to escape her heartbreak, saying repeatedly: ‘I wish I had a river I could skate away on.’”

Mitchell’s “despairing drama” has “long been a popular cover among musicians, hundreds of whom have recorded it for commercial release.” (According to her website, it has been recorded 763 times, second only to “Both Sides Now” at almost twice that number.) Last year Ellie Goulding’s cover rose to No. 1 in Europe. First released on Mitchell’s 1971 classic Blue, the song deliberately evokes the holidays with strains of “Jingle Bells” in its opening bars before descending into its deeply melancholy melody.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpFudDAYqxY

“River” did not enter modern Christmas singalongs until the 1990s. In the Polyphonic video at the top, “Joni Mitchell and the Melancholy of Christmas,” we begin all the way back in the 1880s, with the first recordings of “Jingle Bells.” The history frames Mitchell’s use of the melody, almost a form of sampling, as radical protest of a tune that has become “synonymous with Christmas joy.” It has been recorded by virtually everyone, and was even broadcast from space in 1965 “when astronauts aboard NASA’s Gemini 6 played it as part of a Christmas prank.”

No, says Mitchell, there are real people with real problems down here, and sometimes Christmas sucks. There’ll be no dashing through the snow: “It don’t snow here / Stays pretty green.” The story behind the song is well-known: Mitchell ended her two-year relationship with Graham Nash in 1970, then “skated away” to Europe to escape the “crazy scene.” While in Crete, “she sent Nash a telegram to tell him their relationship was over,” notes Tom Eames. No one should try to force a happy holiday in such times. If you’re craving a little realness with your cheer, consider adding “River” to your playlist.

Related Content:

How Joni Mitchell Wrote “Woodstock,” the Song that Defined the Legendary Music Festival, Even Though She Wasn’t There (1969)

Watch Joni Mitchell Sing an Immaculate Version of Her Song “Coyote,” with Bob Dylan, Roger McGuinn & Gordon Lightfoot (1975)

The Expansive Vocal Range of Joni Mitchell: From the Early to Later Years

The Story of The Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York,” the Boozy Ballad That Has Become One of the Most Beloved Christmas Songs of All Time

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

How Joni Mitchell’s Song of Heartbreak, “River,” Became a Christmas Classic is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/37Agzg6
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What Voltaire Meant When He Said That “We Must Cultivate Our Garden”: An Animated Introduction

“Voltaire’s goal in writing [his 1759 satire Candide ] was to destroy the optimism of his times,” says Alain de Botton in the School of Life video above, “an optimism that centered around science, love, technical progress, and a faith in reason.” These beliefs were folly, Voltaire thought: the transfer of faith from a providential God to a perfect, clockwork universe. Candide satirizes this happy rationalism in Doctor Pangloss, whose belief that ours is the best of possible worlds comes directly from the philosophical optimism of Gottfried Leibniz . The preponderance of the evidence, Voltaire made abundantly clear in the novel’s series of increasingly horrific episodes, points toward a blind, indifferent universe full of needless cruelty and chaos. “Hope was, he felt, a disease,” de Botton says, and “it was Voltaire’s generous goal to try and cure us of it.” But as everyone who has read Candide (or read a summary or brief notes on Candide ) knows, the novel does not end with ...
Post a Comment
Read more

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

An Interactive Map of Odysseus’ 10-Year Journey in Homer’s Odyssey

The Odyssey , one of Homer's two great epics, narrates Odysseus' long, strange trip home after the Trojan war . During their ten-year journey, Odysseus and his men had to overcome divine and natural forces, from battering storms and winds to difficult encounters with the Cyclops Polyphemus, the cannibalistic Laestrygones, the witch-goddess Circe and the rest. And they took a most circuitous route, bouncing all over the Mediterranean, moving first down to Crete and Tunisia. Next over to Sicily, then off toward Spain, and back to Greece again. If you're looking for an easy way to visualize all of the twists and turns in  The Odyssey , then we'd recommend spending some time with the  interactive map created by Gisèle Mounzer .  "Odysseus' Journey"  breaks down Odysseus' voyage into 14 key scenes and locates them on a modern map designed by Esri, a company that creates GIS mapping software. Meanwhile, if you're interested in the whole concept of ...
Post a Comment
Read more