Little Green (song)

Mitchell wrote Little Green in 1966, shortly after she had signed the papers to place her daughter for adoption the previous year, while she was a poor folk singer in Toronto.[1] 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.[2][3][4] 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."[5] Mitchell was reunited with her daughter, Kilauren Gibb, in 1997.[6]

The guitar tuning Mitchell uses on the song is Open G (low-to-high: D G D G B D).[7]

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.[8]

Reflecting on the song for The Atlantic in 2013, Jack Hamilton noted that "Little Green", arguably the most personal song on Blue, was not written about a lover but rather about Mitchell's daughter, concluding that "Blue was Mitchell's way into music that transcended her life to become about yours and everyone else's."[9]