“Woodstock” by Joni Mitchell

"Woodstock" is Joni Mitchell's own reading of her song about a festival she never got to play. She'd been performing it live since 1969, and her recording appeared in April 1970 on Ladies of the Canyon, also tucked onto the flip side of "Big Yellow Taxi". She wrote it after her then-boyfriend Graham Nash, who had played Woodstock, told her what it was like, and it follows one pilgrim on the road to Max Yasgur's farm in New York State for the four-day gathering of August 1969.

Mitchell produced it herself and sings over her own electric piano, and the result is closer to a hymn than a party, eerie and searching. The song, and the festival it remembers, came to stand for the whole counterculture of the 1960s.

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