Joni Mitchell, 1974. Wikimedia Commons.
In Serendipity Doo-Dah: True Stories of Happy Musical Accidents, Book Two, we learned of songwriters who, in the dead heat of a California summer, wrote about the opposite: winter in the distant north.
These were no fly-by-night tunesmiths either: Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne (“Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!”), Bob Wells and Mel Tormé (“Christmas Song”), Irving Berlin (“White Christmas”), and Jay Livingston and Ray Evans (“Silver Bells”).
Ted Gioia referred to this songwriter peculiarity as “geographical incongruity.”[1]
Well, here’s another.
In 1970, Joni Mitchell wrote “River” with its memorable first line, “It’s comin’ on Christmas.” Ensconced in her Laurel Canyon home in the Los Angeles hills, this girl from the Canadian prairies found herself in a place without snow or ice, wishing for a river to skate away on.
Like many of Joni’s songs, it’s a heartbreaker, a sad song of mourning—not decking the halls and making merry.
Because of this, its popularity suffered for a long time, but no more. It has since been covered by more than 500 musicians and taken its place on numerous holiday playlists.[2]
Most importantly, it is now included on the prestigious Geographical Incongruity Song List.
- Edward Allan Faine, Serendipity Doo-Dah, Book Two: True Stories of Happy Musical Accidents (Takoma Park, MD: IM Press, 2018), 17–18; Ted Gioia, The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 138–39.
- Davis Yaffe, Reckless Daughter (New York: Sarah Crichton Books, 2017), 136–37.
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