7.4bn all-time streams (15 May '26)

No female artist better typified the singer/songwriter movement of the '70s than Joni Mitchell, though her public image as the serious, sensitive woman with a guitar shortchanged her abilities, ambitions, and accomplishments.

Mitchell's gift for writing personal, folk-inspired songs about the thorny side of life and love was inarguable (particularly on albums like 1970's Ladies of the Canyon and 1971's Blue), but Mitchell also brought the same smarts and eloquence to glossy pop on her commercial breakthrough, 1974's Court & Spark, and she was incorporating jazz and world music into her work long before either was fashionable in American pop music (and she also collaborated with respected jazz artists such as Charles Mingus, Pat Metheny, and Jaco Pastorius, something none of her peers accomplished).