Crip News Considers Joni Mitchell's Recent Re-debut

[jesse_the_k]

Kevin Gotkin’s free weekly newsletter is full of interesting links to people making disability culture. Kevin’s intention-setting post acknowledges that crip horizons are broad. This Monday, Gotkin examined how Joni Mitchell’s recent return to performance is entwined with impairment and disability, disability loss and gain.

Uncaptioned YouTube video of Joni Singing 'Summertime' at Newport Folk Festival 2022

Quoting Crip News:

The legendary singer’s surprise performance is making the rounds. There are levels to the way disability appears here. Mitchell contracted polio when she was 9, which influenced her distinctive guitar technique. She became disabled again in 2015 after a brain aneurysm. Teaching herself to play guitar again in the last few years, she watched videos of herself as a younger artist. A disabled artist relying on an intrinsic ancestor of a differently disabled artist-self. It’s remarkable. We can celebrate this performance without the pathos about overcoming that the performance drew out among ableds.

But there’s so much more! One of the songs Mitchell performed was “Summertime,” whose lyrics were written by the disabled artist Dubose Heyward. These lyrics came from a mosaic of disability representations in Dubose’s co-authored play Porgy (1925), which preceded the Gershwin musical adaptation where “Summertime” emerged. Disability scholar and icon Dr. Sue Schweik unpacks the way Dubose recasts his white disability experience and appropriation of the experience of a real-life man named Samuel Smalls into those of his Black disabled character. Oh, how much detail about white supremacy and disabled masculinity get missed when ideologies of ability crowd things out!

And then I think of Wynonna Judd in the background of the video, blotting the tears in her eyes. Did the lullaby in the song draw her into grief of her mother’s suicide in April, a day before the duo was to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame? Aren’t disability aesthetics so much more ordinary, subtle, and ubiquitous than the effects of their more legibly political heft?

A special thanks to the always-rad comments on Sue Schweik’s Facebook page, where I learned much of this.

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Comments

[beatrice_otter]

Thank you for sharing this!