The Story Behind “Woodstock,” the Song Joni Mitchell Wrote About the Festival She Didn’t Attend

You know that Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song “Woodstock,” about the iconic music festival? Did you know it was actually written and recorded first by Joni Mitchell? Did you also know that Mitchell didn’t even go to Woodstock, due to her manager booking her for The Dick Cavett Show instead?

Mitchell was given a recount of the festival from then-boyfriend Graham Nash. Then, she wrote the song in her hotel room while watching reports of the festival on TV. Despite not attending the festival, she managed to capture its unique importance in a way that no one else had been able to do, according to David Crosby, who was interviewed as part of PBS’s Joni Mitchell: Woman of Heart and Mind.

“The deprivation of not being able to go provided me with an intense angle on Woodstock,” Mitchell said in 1995. The song itself depicts a traveler heading to Woodstock. The speaker meets another festival-goer on the road, and they continue to travel together until “by the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong.”

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Joni Mitchell Performed “Woodstock” Live Before It Was Ever Recorded

Joni Mitchell first performed “Woodstock” in 1969 at the Big Sur Folk Festival. It was then released on her 1970 album Ladies of the Canyon as a B-side for “Big Yellow Taxi.”

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young also recorded a rock-leaning version of “Woodstock,” which ultimately became more well-known than Mitchell’s original version. Possibly because hers was a B-side, but it also could have had something to do with the contrasting arrangement of the two tracks.

The CSNY version opened with a riff by Neil Young and included a solo by Young as well. There were also lead vocals from Stephen Stills. The other three members provided backing vocals. Overall, it was an almost total tone shift between Mitchell’s version and CSNY’s. Mitchell composed the song on an electric piano with a tremolo effect. She also used layered backing vocals on top of her solo vocals. CSNY turned it into a rollicking rock tune.

An additional performance on BBC Radio 1 by Matthews Southern Comfort put more fire under the “Woodstock” cauldron, so to speak. In 1970, the group performed as part of Radio 1’s Live in Concert series. They kept true to Mitchell’s original version but changed the melody for a recorded single, as Iain Matthews said he “couldn’t hit [Joni Mitchell’s] high notes.”

However, when Matthews eventually met Joni Mitchell, she shared that she preferred the single version over her own, according to a recollection from the 2015 book Jingle Jangle Morning: Folk-Rock of the 1960s. Take a listen to all three versions of “Woodstock”; which one is your favorite?

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