Through these sporadic evenings in which she doubled as entertainer, Joni was developing a following, and she was determined to improve her musicianship. “Joni wanted to play better,” recalls Shawn Phillips, a featured performer at the Riel. “I distinctly remember telling her that anything she could do at the lower end of the guitar neck she could do higher up. I think she was intrigued by my use of nonstandard chords” on his signature “The Bells of Rhymney,” in which Pete Seeger embellished and set to music the words of a coal-miner friend of Dylan Thomas, yielding a song—
Oh what will you give me
Say the sad bells of Rhymney…
—that was typical of the romantic, half- or faux-archaic songs that were then so popular.
Joni has said she was fascinated by Phillips. “He was the first person I’d ever known who had written a song. For some reason that was really intriguing to me, really exotic.” Joni’s awe at the new world she was in was not lost on Phillips. “Joni was curious,” Shawn says. “There was that glint in her eye—she wasn’t asleep at the wheel, like most inhabitants of a small town are. She had the sense that many young people who grow up in the stifling ambience of rural communities have—that there was certainly something more to the world than Saskatoon.”
Wearing a veil, a long white wedding gown—and an extremely tight girdle to hide her three-month pregnancy—D’Arcy Case married Rudy Hinter in a proper ceremony in a high-vaulted local Anglican church on May 11, 1963. Joni was a wedding guest. A special entertainment was built into the ceremony. Just before D’Arcy walked down the aisle, from the balcony two soaring-voiced young male Negro singers stood and delivered a stirring hymn in the formal timbre and phrasing that recalled Paul Robeson but with a folk and gospel undertone. The singing wedding guests were Joe Gilbert, a tenor, and Eddie Brown, a baritone—two very handsome young men in the Harry Belafonte mold, from California’s Bay Area. They were wearing, as they did in their performances at the Riel and other clubs, matching small-shouldered jackets with skinny lapels. In the elite world of black folksingers (of which Josh White was king) the pair—billed as Joe & Eddie and possessed of a chart hit, “There’s a Meetin’ Here Tonight”—were the strongest comers. For years they had been favorites at campus parties at the University of California in their native Berkeley; then they had played San Francisco’s legendary Hungry i. As their discoverer and producer Gene Norman, of Crescendo Records, put it in the liner notes to their first album, “They appeal to every age and musical preference group…The teenage ‘Top 40’ fan, the college crowd, the ethnic folknik, the gospel fan, the old-timers who simply enjoy good old two-part harmony—Joe and Eddie reach them all.” They had just appeared on television’s The Danny Kaye Show.
Of the two, Joe—compact, honey-skinned, particularly handsome—was the ladykiller. With his furrowed brow and his sensual lips, set in a generous jaw, he radiated intensity. Joni turned her head up to the balcony as they sang and noticed him. Afterward, at the reception, she and Joe moved toward each other and began talking. They made a striking pair—two beautiful, trim, poised young people of counterpoint complexions. They did more talking at the Louis Riel that week, between Joni’s bobbing and weaving among the tables with her trays full of steamed coffee and sandwiches, and Joe’s spirited duetting with Eddie on “[They Call the Wind] Mariah” and “Children, Go Where I Send Thee.”
Joe and Eddie were staying with D’Arcy and Rudy, who now had a large home with a pool. The Hinters played host to the club’s black singers, who felt uncomfortable in the nearly milk-white outpost. (When, originally, D’Arcy had driven Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee to the best hotel in town, the medieval-castle-like Bessborough, where she expected them to check in, the two snapped at the naïve little white girl, “You don’t know nothing. We can’t stay here.” “They looked like they were about to be lynched,” recalls D’Arcy. After that, Terry and McGhee stayed at D’Arcy and Rudy’s house whenever they played the Riel. So did folksinger Len Chandler, who came to Saskatoon with his white wife, Nancy, and didn’t want to be hassled.)*
Joe and Eddie stayed with the newly married Hinters, but not out of fear of standing out in an all-white hotel. “They had none of that old-school attitude: acting so polite, being scared of the white authorities,” says D’Arcy. Rather, they did so for comfort and camaraderie. “Both of them were married, but their wives didn’t come with them on the road”; staying at a private home and getting home-cooked meals was a perk. The two were different. “Eddie was a big softie, but Joe was arrogant—very arrogant,” D’Arcy recalls. “So arrogant he was almost mean. That Joe, he could break any girl’s heart.”
D’Arcy noticed that Joni Anderson was falling for Joe. A romance seemed to be blooming between them—either that or, D’Arcy hastens to add, it may have been “just a meeting of the minds” or a case of “love of the person and the musical sounds they were producing.” Whatever the scope of the infatuation, one night D’Arcy took Joni aside and, in an effort to protect her, said, “Look, Joni, it will never work—Joe’s married!” But the warning seemed to fall on deaf ears. “I think she fell in love with him,” D’Arcy says.
In the fall of 1963 a very pregnant D’Arcy Case, despondent in her marriage to her abusive husband, tried to throw herself off a building. After the failed suicide attempt, D’Arcy was hospitalized with “situational depression”; out of concern for the health of her unborn baby, she refused medication—and then, faced with the likelihood that the baby (a girl, born in November 1963) could be legally snatched away from her, she “got sane, real fast,” as she puts it.* The lesson implicit in D’Arcy’s near-tragedy—that serious misery could ensue when panic and shame forced a pregnant girl to marry the wrong man, just for respectability—would soon prove a useful cautionary tale to Joni Anderson.
The Southern Alberta Institute of Technology—SAIT, as it was called—was a pair of buildings: a modern one of brick and glass and a stately Gothic counterpart, both set on a wide-lawned campus in Calgary, Alberta. There—engulfed by the institute’s main student body (one thousand slide-rule-wielding crew-cut males majoring in aeronautical engineering, aircraft maintenance, agricultural mechanics, commercial radio, diesel mechanics, power plant engineering, and a half dozen similar fields)—as if air-dropped from a separate planet, were 160 other students. Most of them were sporting goatees, growing out their own crew-cuts into greasy ponytails, donning T-shirts with holes in them, and inwardly smiling triumphantly as—in a touché to their farm-raised parents’ puzzled disapproval of their career choice—they charcoal-sketched every curve of the nude models in life drawing class. These were the students in SAIT’s College of Art. Although the engineering students probably thought, as one art student surmised, “Who are these kooks?” the art students were proud of their individualism and thrilled to be drawn together like kindred needles culled from the vast haystack of central Canada. As one of them, Bruce Sterling, says, “We were all small-town country kids trying to be Jackson Pollock.”
The other thing that distinguished the College of Art from most of the rest of SAIT was women—something the industrial students took note of, by way of gauntlets of wolf whistles. Every third art student was female and, judging from the 1964 yearbook, many of them were lovely, stylish girls—girls with gamey smiles and teased bubbles and flips (“We were still back-combing our hair, but we were hippies,” says Joni’s classmate Beverly Nodwell DeJong) and some with long, Left Bank–worthy tresses and serious, penetrating gazes. Among the loveliest was Joni Anderson, whose class photo shows her with a bouffant-topped, thick-banged “shelf pageboy,” the popular hairstyle that year, attained by setting the rollers vertically. Joni was still assuming that art, not music, would be her calling.
Although she’d come from a year of sophisticated coffeehouse life—and, just as college was starting, had traveled north to take the stage with her guitar at the Yardbird Suite and the Depression, two coffeehouses in Edmonton—she had the same “quiet country girl�
� way about her as the other students, Bruce Sterling recalls. “But she also seemed driven, and equally so about art and music.” Beverly DeJong remembers “a presence about Joni, a strength.” Sterling adds something else: while many of the girls switched from skirts to pants as the freshman year wore on, “Joni continued wearing skirts all year. And she always smelled good. She maintained a straitlaced, ladylike air with the administration and the teachers, and she became one of their favorites.”
As a freshman art student, Joni took the required curriculum—two drawing courses: one expressive, the other analytical; the history of art; an English course; elements and principles of art (composition in second semester); and an elective: introduction to painting or printmaking, textiles, or ceramics. Joni was talented; fellow student Doug Bovee recalls her paintings were “very poetic—she was not someone who handled high realism very well, but they always had a lyrical quality—the figures were elongated”; Beverly DeJong cites her “beautiful drawings: flowers and self-portraits.” Most of the young women in her class were also talented—showing one’s work was a prerequisite for enrollment. But while women comprised a third of the art school, the prevailing sentiment was that important artists were, by definition, male. Not one of the 2,300 artists cited in H. W. Janson’s History of Art (the seminal text at the time) was female. On New York’s Abstract Expressionist/Color Field scene—the students’ lodestar—amid Pollock, Still, de Kooning, Motherwell, Rivers, Rothko, Twombly, and Noland, there were very few women, chiefly Helen Fran-kenthaler and an American named (coincidentally) Joan Mitchell, who moved to Paris. This Cedar Tavern/Tenth Street galleries crowd was high-testosterone; its females were either gallery owners like Betty Parsons, or artists-turned-husband-managers like Lee Krasner, or molls, like Larry Rivers’s mate Maxine Groffsky, a literary agent in her inconspicuous nonloft life, and Ruth Kligman, the crowd’s Elizabeth Taylor in both appearance and romantic appetite, who quickly went from mourning her lover Jackson Pollock (dead in the drunken car crash she’d survived) to romancing Willem de Kooning. In this two-fisted set it helped that a woman artist be beautiful, like Eva Hesse, or beautiful and towering, like Marisol.
That gender assumption was alive and well at SAIT. Beverly DeJong, who today makes large architectural installations, remembers that shortly after she arrived there, “a male guidance counselor told me, ‘You should go into crafts. My wife did that and she always had fun, teaching children.’ And there were discussions with male students about it; a friend was absolutely certain he should be paid more for an art job than me. A few years later I joined the staff of the art college—I was the only female among fifty instructors from 1969 to 1976—and, sure enough, I got paid less than the men.” Of the many art instructors in 1963–64, all were men, DeJong recalls, except Marion Nicholl, an Abstract Expressionist and a large woman “who wore muumuus and always seemed angry that she had to be teaching rather than painting, but that made her more endearing.”
Joni has said that the school’s emphasis on Abstract Expressionism turned her off, though George Mihalcheon, a painter and painting teacher who was on its faculty, says that, though Ab-Ex prevailed in painting, “the college had ten different disciplines at the time; it’s hard to say there was a common direction.” Whatever the reason, “music was part of Joni’s life in that school, from day one. She used to sit in the hallway and pluck her guitar,” recalls classmate Doug Bovee. “She played the guitar in the washroom—the bathroom,” Beverly DeJong says. Then she started performing at lunchtime—on a little raised platform, in the foyer of the auditorium, which was right across from the cafeteria, so all the students could hear it. “She was pretty good,” remembers ceramics teacher Walter Drohan. “We thought she was leaning more toward entertaining than art.” “Many, many lunch hours, Joni would be in the foyer, or in the auditorium itself, singing,” Bruce Sterling recalls. “Songs like ‘Kumbaya.’ We were all very political. The day Kennedy was assassinated everyone congregated together. A lot of us felt very close to him—he was going to save the world for us, too. Except there were also anti-American Canadians, who were mad at Kennedy for antagonizing the Russians during the Cuban missile crisis and who figured the Russians would come down from the north on us, not the U.S. They figured he got what was coming to him. The school was polarized when Kennedy was assassinated. I don’t remember which side Joni was on, but she was very vocal and political in favor of the civil rights movement, so she probably mourned Kennedy, like most of us did.”
Soon hootenannies were set up in the auditorium at lunch hour and after classes, and Joni—in her shelf pageboy and her proper skirt and blouse—was the main performer, seated before a dramatic, Bosch-like student-painted mural of Viking dragon slayers. A teacher from the industrial drafting department who was also an amateur folksinger—a man in his thirties named Eric Whittred—formed a duo with her. “Ours was a strictly off-the-cuff presentation, but she certainly had talent and a lovely voice,” Whittred recalls. “Joni did a beautiful job on a Kingston Trio song, ‘Oh, Sail Away’—it moved me, and many of us. We would sing ‘Sloop John B’ and ‘Jamaica Farewell,’ songs by the Kingston Trio and Harry Belafonte. ‘Tom Dooley’ was at the height of its popularity”—actually, it had been a hit five years earlier—“so we definitely did that.” As SAIT students gathered around and sang and swayed in unison, Joni Anderson and Eric Whittred sang “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,” “The Whiffenpoof Song,” “Lemon Tree,” and Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which had been a hit for Peter, Paul and Mary the previous summer. Joni was aware of Dylan by now (and in her earliest appearances in Canada, in the coming year, her look would be compared to Mary Travers’s), though it would not be until he blared out “You got a lot of nerve, to say you are my friend…” in the opening bars of “Positively 4th Street” in September 1965 that it came to her, like a lightning bolt, that “you could write about anything. It was a different kind of song than I had ever heard.”
On weekends Joni played the local clubs—mainly the Fourth Dimension—“singing long, tragic songs in a minor key,” as she puts it. Joni’s eminence as the campus folksinger, her beauty, and her growing self-possession made her extremely popular. “There were lots of suitors at her door—and, unfortunately, I wasn’t one of them, not that I didn’t try,” says Bruce Sterling, adding that Joni’s popularity could make her “aloof” and argumentative. “One day she would be going on, with her social consciousness, about the poor bum on the street, and the next day she’d walk right by him; but if you called her attention to her inconsistency, she’d snap at you.” But she also exuded kindness. “She was very patient and compassionate to Doug Bovee,” Sterling remembers. Bovee had had polio as a child—even before the great epidemic of 1953, to which Joni had fallen victim—and he had been irreversibly affected. He got around campus in long-arm braces and sometimes in a wheelchair. “Our lockers were near each other’s, and Joni would help me get things out of mine if I couldn’t reach them” Bovee says. “I think she respected me—or maybe she feared me. Maybe it was ‘There but for fortune go I.’” Joni never told Bovee that she, too, had had polio; he learned this only after she was famous and the polio story became a dramatic, character-revealing part of her biography. No one at the art school knew. The symptoms of the childhood brush with the disease were gone, and, plunging into adulthood, she was keeping the frightening past in the past.
Joni, who had spent her post-polio girlhood negotiating the fine line between the “good girl” and “bad girl” dichotomy that existed in middle-class society, had now found a way to master it. Safely far from home, she developed a dual persona, alternating the department-store-model propriety with the coffeehouse freedom. Off campus, “she was a bit of a party gal,” says Doug Bovee. “There was a restlessness on her part; she was in the fast lane of the fast group.” Bruce Sterling says, “For all her straitlaced appearance in school, when she was down at the clubs she drank hardy, and she was kind of an animal, making sexual innuendo
s [sic] at the guys. She was picking up guys and letting them pick her up, putting out signals and spending time in cars and going places. She had lots of boyfriends at the time, boyfriends in the real sense”—at least from what he heard. How did he know? Reliably or unreliably: “Guys talk.”
In school, however, she took care to keep the alternate image burnished. SAIT had a beauty contest for queen of the school every year, and since the vast majority of the females in the school were in the art school, the pressure was on the pretty art students to enter. One of the most respected art teachers, George Anglis, told the women in his class they shouldn’t yield to that pressure. “He said, ‘Don’t run for queen, it will take too much time away from your work,’” recalls Beverly Nodwell DeJong, who at the time was an extremely fetching brunette who could easily have been a contender. Beverly took the teacher’s advice and didn’t toss her hat in the ring. Joni Anderson did, however.
The six queen candidates lined up for a photo in virtually identical dark, below-knee-length suits, black pocketbooks looped on their arms. They looked like a ladies’ luncheon group or a sextet of dowdy stewardesses. Joni stands out: her expression, professionally camera-friendly; her suit, chic and youthful; her stance model-like; her accessories (long black gloves, arty brooch), cutting-edge. Unlike the others, she knew how to present herself in public, even in this conventional guise. The campaign poster she made for herself (a vertical, doubled “JOAN” next to a horizontal “Anderson,” with action-painter splotches over a self-portrait) was more sophisticated than the others. The student body voted. Joni was runner-up to Queen Sheila Dalgarno, a thick-eyebrowed brunette with chiseled features who’d had the advantage of being not in the art college but in lab tech.
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