Did Joni Mitchell give a kid up for adoption to feed a drug habit?

Search: joni mitchell

Why: On the comments for this YouTube video of "Big Yellow Taxi" (1970):

azazel637 (2 days ago)

i read she sold her own daughter to feed a drug habit when she was just 22. In her songs she likes to come across as pure but shes not.

Answer: Ermm... that is probably an exaggeration. First, from Wikipedia:

She found out that she was pregnant by her college ex-boyfriend, and in February 1965 she gave birth to a baby girl. A few weeks after the birth, Joni Anderson married folk-singer Chuck Mitchell, and took his surname. A few weeks later she gave her daughter, Kelly Dale Anderson, up for adoption. The experience remained private for most of her career, but she made allusions to it in several songs, most notably a very specific telling of the story in the 1971 song "Little Green". Mitchell's 1982 song "Chinese Cafe", from the album Wild Things Run Fast, includes the lyrics "Your kids are coming up straight / My child's a stranger / I bore her / But I could not raise her".

Mitchell's daughter, renamed Kilauren Gibb, began a search for her as an adult. In 1997 Gibb mentioned her search to the girlfriend of a man with whom she had grown up. By coincidence, this woman knew a third person who had once told her that he knew Joni Mitchell years earlier "when she was pregnant". Mitchell and her daughter were reunited shortly thereafter.

Next, here is a pretty interesting account of the whole ordeal, which I find especially interesting - I think you know why. Tidbits:

• The child’s father, a Calgary artist named Brad MacMath, had, as the song says, disappeared "to California/hearing everything was warmer there." Joni balked at the prospect of being a single, destitute mother, and was not prepared to ask her parents back in Saskatchewan for help - they did not even know she was pregnant.
• Kilauren grew up in a world of private schools and country clubs and tropical vacations. She landed a career as a fashion model.
• The mystery of Kilauren’s adoption cast a lengthening shadow over her life. She says that her parents did not tell her she was adopted until she was 27 and pregnant with her own child. Kilauren then embarked on a frustrating five-year quest to track down her birth mother. Now 32, she is separated from the father of her son, Marlin, who is almost 4. And a "happy ending" quite different from the one envisioned in Little Green has come to pass.
• Losing Kilauren to her birth mother "was our greatest fear," adoptive mother Ida Gibb told Maclean’s last week. "It was a nightmare that this would happen to us when she was little and when she was a teenager. Now, it is easier to take. But it’s still hard."

And another interview about how she was kind of a "good time Charlie" square.

Source: Wikipedia, The Canadian Encyclopedia

The More You Know: From "Little Green" (listen here):

Born with the moon in Cancer
Choose her a name she will answer to
Call her green for the children that have made her

...

Child with a child pretending
Weary of lies you are sending home
So you sign all the papers in the family name
You're sad and you're sorry, but you're not ashamed
Little green, have a happy ending