Released 1971 Length 3:25 Writer(s) Joni Mitchell | Genre Folk rock Label Reprise Producer(s) Joni Mitchell | |
"Little Green" is a song composed and performed by Joni Mitchell. It is the third track on her 1971 album Blue.
Mitchell wrote Little Green in 1967 about the daughter she had placed for adoption in 1965, when she was a poor folk singer in Toronto. The existence of her daughter, originally called Kelly Dale, was not publicly known until 1993, when a roommate from Mitchell's art-school days in the 1960s sold the story of the adoption to a tabloid magazine. Mitchell commented on the situation in an interview quoted in a 1998 article: "I was dirt poor. An unhappy mother does not raise a happy child. It was difficult parting with the child, but I had to let her go." Mitchell was reunited with her daughter, Kilauren Gibb, in 1997.
The guitar tuning Mitchell uses on the song is Open G (low-to-high: D G D G B D).
Critical reaction
Writing for Rolling Stone in 1971, Timothy Crouse, said:
Several of the lesser cuts on Blue give every indication of having sat in Joni's trunk for some time. The folkie melody of "Little Green" recalls "I Don't Know Where I Stand" from her second album. The pretty, "poetic" lyric is dressed up in such cryptic references that it passeth all understanding.