Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell with English singer-songwriter and musician Graham Nash at Heathrow Airport, London, UK, 30th December 1969. (Photo by Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Despite its fantastical origin story of surviving a shrapnel attack in the Vietnamese jungle, the D-28 met its demise on a flight to Hawaii. Not only did the turbulent flight damage the instrument in storage; someone later stole the guitar from the luggage carousel. Mitchell was never able to find her long-lost instrument, something she’s lamented for years.
Aside from the sentimental connection guitarists typically have to their first ax, Mitchell was particularly fond of her Martin for functional reasons. After a bout of childhood polio affected Mitchell’s ability to form chord shapes in standard tuning, the singer-songwriter had to adapt with eccentric tunings that allowed her to create rich harmonic structure with limited mobility.
Whether open, an octave below, or otherwise, Mitchell’s unique tunings placed stress on the guitar neck that it wasn’t originally made to endure. Moreover, to ensure the dissonance within her tunings was purposeful and not merely off-pitch, Mitchell needed a guitar with pristine intonation—something she frequently lauded the D-28 for having.
“I need really good intonation,” she explained to Acoustic Guitar. “One of the signs of really good intonation is how flashy the harmonics are with a light touch. You should be able to get them to bloom like jewels.” While Mitchell has found other guitars that come close in that department, as she put it in her 1996 magazine interview, “I’ve never found an acoustic that could compare with it.”
Photo by Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
UNSPECIFIED – CIRCA 1976: Photo of Joni Mitchell, Mitchell Joni 094 c MOA (The Last Waltz Nov 1976 Winterland San Francisco) (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
