The Gut-Wrenching Song That Joni Mitchell Wrote About Her First Marriage

Before Joni Mitchell was, well, Joni Mitchell, she was Joni Anderson, a girl with a guitar and an aptitude for folk music from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. That is, until she met Chuck Mitchell, a folk singer from New York City who would sweep her off her feet and ask her to marry him 36 hours after their first meeting.

At the time, Joni had just given birth to her daughter, whom she’d become pregnant with while at art college. Her marriage to Chuck was, as she would describe it later, “a marriage of convenience.”

On her first album, Song To a Seagull, which came out in 1968, Joni sings about her mysterious marriage to Chuck in a song called “I Had A King”.

The track reveals her true feelings about the relationship, during which Mitchell felt her creativity was stifled.

“To get away from him, I would go out and drink coffee and write,” she once shared.

In the chorus of “I Had A King”, Joni sings about “a king in a tenement castle,” which seems to be a reference to Chuck.

I can’t go back there anymore
You know my keys won’t fit the door
You know my thoughts don’t fit the man
They never can, they never can.

Ultimately, Mitchell’s baby would be given up for adoption, and Chuck and Joni would divorce in 1967.

How Joni’s First Marriage Changed Her Artistry

If you are familiar with the works of Mitchell, you know she’s written plenty of songs chronicling past relationships, from “My Old Man” to “A Case Of You”. However, it was the fading of her marriage to Chuck that served as the “catalyst” for her musical storytelling.

From the beginning, their relationship in part revolved around music, which they played together in coffeehouses and clubs.

“We are both strong-minded people, and we both had our own ways of doing a number,” Mitchell once shared. “There were some hectic times until we blended our styles.”

Joni had started playing music when she was young but didn’t truly get into songwriting until the mid-60s. This wasn’t a passion that her then-husband necessarily encouraged.

“Chuck was a good guy, but he didn’t share the enthusiasm about her songwriting,” Tom Rush, an early champion of Joni, once said. “He was more interested in sticking with the traditional folk stuff. She was more interested in creating new stuff. After they broke up, he kept singing and playing shows.”

Following their divorce, Mitchell would move into an apartment by herself and begin to pursue her own artistry.

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