> > <<"Sleep little darlin'!
> > This is your happy home
> > Hiroshima cannot be pardoned!
> > Don't have kids when you get grown
> > Because this world is shattered>>
> >
> > This section of the verse caught my ear...I wonder
> > if this is the sort of thing that Joni constantly
> > got from her Mom? If so, it would have made her
> > pregnancy that much more difficult to deal with.
>From Musician Magazine, 1988 (Thanks to JMDL.com's great search engine):
"My mother's maiden name was Myrtle McKee," she explained. "'The Tea Leaf
Prophecy' is based up to a certain point on my parents' courtship. I mean, I
use it as a vehicle for other statements at the end, because I would then be
the child, and she never exactly said those words to me." Joni laughed.
"Although I was such a pain in the butt she might as well have. What
happened was, during World War II my mother was working in a bank. Most of
the available men had shipped out, so there were only kids, old men and cops
left. She and a girlfriend went to this tea room in the first-class hotel in
Regina, Saskatchewan. They had high tea there, from the English tradition.
At the end the gypsy read her tea leaves. She said, 'You will be married
within the month, you will have a child within the year, and you will die a
long and agonizing death.' I didn't put that last one in the song. My mother
said, 'Well, that's ridiculous. Look at this town, there's no one to pick
from and I'm not going with anybody!' Two weeks later she met my father, he
had two weeks' leave, they got married in that short space of time and I was
born within a year. So now she's a real scourer! No germs are going to get
her, she's not having the third one come true!"
That explains Mitchell's description in 1972's "Let the Wind Carry Me":
"Mama she believes in cleaning."
"Yeah," Joni smiled. "She's unbelievably healthy. But the odds on it were so
freaky that I don't blame her for being psyched out. I sent her the tape and
she said, 'Is that about Pop and I?' I said, 'Part of it is.' She didn't
really express anything about it. With 'Let the Wind Carry Me' she said,
'Oh, you're not going to start taking pot shots at me up there, are you?'
She didn't like that one very much." Mitchell laughed, and then sighed.
"Writers are a cruel lot, aren't they? They just raid life."
Patricia O'Connor
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
