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Early life and education

Mitchell was born Roberta Joan Anderson on November 7, 1943, in Fort Macleod, Alberta, the daughter of Myrtle Marguerite (née McKee) and William Andrew Anderson. Her mother's ancestors were Scottish and Irish; her father was from a Norwegian family that may have had some Sámi ancestry. Her mother was a teacher. Her father was a Royal Canadian Air Force flight lieutenant who instructed new pilots at RCAF Station Fort Macleod. During World War II, she moved with her parents to various bases in western Canada. After the war ended, her father worked as a grocer and her family moved to Saskatchewan, living in Maidstone and North Battleford. She later sang about her small-town upbringing in several of her songs, including " Song for Sharon ".

Mitchell contracted polio at age nine and was hospitalized for weeks. She also started smoking that year, but denies that smoking has affected her voice.

She moved with her family to Saskatoon, which she considers her hometown, at age 11. Mitchell struggled at school; her main interest was painting. During this time she briefly studied classical piano. She focused on her creative talent and considered a singing or dancing career for the first time. One unconventional teacher, Arthur Kratzmann, made an impact on her, stimulating her to write poetry; her first album includes a dedication to him. She dropped out of school in grade 12 (resuming her studies later) and hung out downtown with a rowdy set until she decided that she was getting too close to the criminal world.

Mitchell wanted to play the guitar, but as her mother associated the instrument with country music and disapproved of its hillbilly associations, she initially settled for the ukulele. Eventually she taught herself guitar from a Pete Seeger songbook. Polio had weakened her left hand, so she devised alternative tunings to compensate; she later used these tunings to create nonstandard approaches to harmony and structure in her songwriting.

Mitchell started singing with her friends at bonfires around Waskesiu Lake, northwest of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. She widened her repertoire to include her favourite performers, such as Édith Piaf and Miles Davis, at age 18. Her first paid performance was on October 31, 1962, at a Saskatoon club that featured folk and jazz performers. Although she never performed jazz herself in those days, Mitchell and her friends sought out gigs by jazz musicians. Mitchell said, "My jazz background began with one of the early Lambert, Hendricks and Ross albums." That album, The Hottest New Group in Jazz, was hard to find in Canada, she says, "so I saved up and bought it at a bootleg price. I considered that album to be my Beatles. I learned every song off of it, and I don't think there is another album anywhere—including my own—on which I know every note and word of every song."

After graduating from high school at Aden Bowman Collegiate in Saskatoon, Mitchell took art classes at the Saskatoon Technical Collegiate with abstract expressionist painter Henry Bonli and left home to attend the Alberta College of Art in Calgary for the 1963–64 school year. She felt disillusioned about the high priority given to technical skill over free-class creativity there, and felt out of step with the trend toward pure abstraction and the tendency to move into commercial art. She dropped out of school after a year at age 20, due to an unexpected pregnancy (with her daughter Kilauren). She then started playing music in the nightclubs of Canada.