Joni Mitchell (1943-) music heals the heart. Born Roberta Joan Anderson on this day in Alberta, Canada, she survived childhood polio with a creative passion for painting, poetry, and music. She used over 50 different guitar tunings to compensate for her polio-weakened left hand.

"Freedom is necessary for me in order to create," she explained. "The most important thing is to write in your own blood."

In seventh grade Mitchell bought a baritone ukulele, then learned to play the guitar from a Pete Seeger instruction book. After high school, she graduated to playing Calgary coffeehouses ("dark cafe days") and studying art.

"When the spirit of child’s play enters into the creative process, it’s a wonderful force and something to be nurtured," she once said, writing her music first and then her lyrics.

In 1968, Tom Rush recorded Circle Game and Judy Collins soared with Both Sides Now. Her records sold and continue to sell. With highly-personal lyrics and complex, jazzy arrangements, her voice, her guitar, and her art inspired freedom.

"I was a free man in Paris," she sang with her lilting soprano voice in Court And Spark (1974). "I felt unfettered and alive. There was nobody calling me up for favors, no one's future to decide."

"We are stardust. We are golden," she penned about the Woodstock generation. "And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden."

Soaring with beauty, her music heals.

Your heart does heal.