Two years after Joni was booed by a room of black female prisoners in New Jersey, in December 1977, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter was released. Many people who first saw the album cover may not have realized that the image of a black man in full pimp regalia, captured by Norman Seeff’s camera, was Joni herself. Joni’s provocation—a white woman dressed as a black male boss pimp—comes with historical baggage, much of which was unknown to her. Blackface minstrelsy—white performers blacking up with burnt cork and singing “coon songs,” the most famous example of which was Ernest Hogan’s “All Coons Look Alike to Me” — was the dominant form of popular entertainment after the Civil War, all the way through the 1920s vaudeville era. White performers would perform in terrifying makeup and do imitations — sometimes grotesque, sometimes in homage — of the black performers doing a far superior version of songs in early jazz and blues, although there were also famous black minstrel performers, most notably Bert Williams and Johnny Hudgins. The Jazz Singer (1927), the first talkie, was a sentimental biopic for Al Jolson, torn between his Jewish family’s expectation for him to be a cantor, and his passionate need to sing “Mammy” in blackface.Joni, defending her own costume, also defended Jolson. “Al Jolson’s not a Stepin Fetchit,” Joni told me. “He’s a Jew in blackface, so he’s always getting the better end of the deal, kind of like Bugs Bunny. And I didn’t see anything derogatory. But the prejudice was enormous. What I did that, people thought it was a bro, and it wasn’t stereotypical, it was individual. Why I got away with it . . . I got the greatest reviews for that record in black magazines. They saw the brother, they reviewed it, and they got it.”
It’s not clear how many black journalists even recognized Joni on the cover of the album or how many black magazines actually reviewed it. The black music journalist Greg Tate, who interviewed Joni for Vibe magazine in 1998 and wrote a poem, “How Black Is Joni Mitchell?,” for Joni’s honorary doctorate ceremony a few years later, would come out in passionate support for what he called her “stunt.” Janet Maslin was the only journalist for a major publication, Rolling Stone, to criticize Joni’s album cover. “The album offers what is, one can only hope, the ultimate in cute cover art,” Maslin wrote. She is blunt in her attack: “Here and elsewhere, there seems to be the notion that blacks and Third World people have more rhythm, more fun and a secret, mischievous viewpoint that the author, dressed as a black man in one of the photos on the front jacket, presumes to share.”
Maslin didn’t approve, but she was one of the few journalists who actually noticed. Joni’s costume was so convincing, most people did not realize it was her.
After Joni failed to reach a room full of black female prisoners because she, as Joan Baez said, “couldn’t do black,” she decided she’d one-up them all by being black. “So there came Halloween, and I was walking down Hollywood Boulevard,” Joni recalled. “There were a lot of people out on the street wearing wigs and paint and masks, and I was thinking, ‘What can I do for a costume?’ Then a black guy walked by me with a New York diddybop kind of step, and he said in the most wonderful way, Lookin’ good, sister, lookin’ gooood. His spirit was infectious and I thought, ‘I’ll go as him.’ I bought the makeup, the wig, the sideburns, I went into a sleazy menswear [store] and bought a sleazy hat and a sleazy suit, and that night I went to a Halloween party and nobody knew it was me, nobody.”
When Joni was planning a memoir, she said that the opening would be “I was the only black man at the party,” and her intent was to be a combination of pimp and artistic creation. She would dress up as this character from time to time and never got spotted, even by men who should have known. Sometimes she would call this character Art Nouveau; other times he would be Claude the Pimp. In a 1979 concert taped for Showtime, in the middle of “Furry Sings the Blues,” on the line “everybody’s fly,” she turned into her pimp character. What was troubling was that her desire to be the black man on the street superseded the unsettling history. Art Nouveau/Claude the Pimp, as he appears on the cover of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, is a dead ringer for Zip Coon, the minstrel character ridiculed for trying to dress the part of a gentleman. Zip Coon, like Jim Crow and Tambo, was a standard figure in minstrel shows. Zip Coon was the dandy, Tambo was the singing, dancing fool, and Jim Crow was ignorant and poor—a pretty accurate indicator for the intention behind the Jim Crow laws. And yet Chaka Khan, who, as a teenager, had been a member of the militant Black Panther party, had no problem with the cover of the album for which she provided vocals. “I loved the cover of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter,” she said unequivocally. “She’s into color. She’s a world of person, and she lived that, she sang that, she is that. I am, too. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s a way to go.”
― ˈʌglɪɪst preɪ, Sunday, 14 June 2020 20:23 (three years ago) link