C-G-D-F-C-E

• OVERVIEW •

Gives root to the sensual strums of Coyote, the first track from Joni Mitchell’s 1976 Hejira album – once described by literary academic Dr. Ruth Charnock as “either the most flirtatious song about fucking or the most graphic song about flirting ever written”.

 

Her tuning is essentially ‘Hejira + Open C’ (split, respectively, as: 6-5-4-3 | 2-1str). It forms a 5ths-focused reshuffling of tones 1-5 of the major scale (1-2-3-4-5 as 1-5-2-4-1-3): hear how the vocals weave in and out of this odd geometry). Ideal for wide extensions, with four perfect adjacent intervals bringing a full, robust quality. 

Pattern: 7>7>3>7>4

Harmony: Cmaj(9/11) | 1-5-2-4-1-3

• TUNING TONES •

• SOUNDS •

Joni chose Coyote to open the Hejira album. A 2016 feature on the Music Aficionado blog outlines the song’s origins: “[Joni] decided to take a road trip on her own, an ideal opportunity to reflect and meditate as she drove through highways and farmlands…She stated that ‘This album was written mostly while I was traveling in the car‘” [also see Black Crow tuning: featuring taxis, trains, ferries, and pontoon planes].

 

Coyote “describes her brief relationship with [author and playwright] Sam Shepard, whom she met at the Rolling Thunder Revue, the concert tour that Bob Dylan assembled with a travelling caravan of musicians…[Joni] joined the tour…in late 1975 – and it remained with her as a lingering memory of ego clashes infused by pharmaceuticals and cocaine“.

 

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• Coyote (Rolling Thunder Revue) – Joni Mitchell (1975):

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“Where the players lick their wounds,
And take their temporary lovers,
And their pills and powders,
To get them through this passion play,
No regrets, coyote…”

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The lyrics, while generally remaining poetic, leave little to the imagination in places. Sam Shepard is barely fictionalised: true to life, Joni details how his seduction came while he was married, and also having an affair with their tour manager (“He’s got a woman at home, another woman down the hall, but he seems to want me anyway”) – and describes his morning-after manner in unsparing terms (“Coyote’s in the coffee shop…He picks up my scent on his fingers, while he’s watching the waitresses’ legs”). But in the end, she has “no regrets Coyote…”.

 

As with Hejira, Black Crow, and Refuge of the Roads, Jaco Pastorius’ divine fretless bass layers form an integral part of the overall magic. He would return to Joni’s group for her 1979 Mingus tour, as captured on the 1980 Shadows & Light album – where Coyote is performed by the all-time all-star band of Joni, Jaco, Pat Metheny on guitar, Michael Brecker on sax, Lyle Mays on keys, and Don Alias on congas & percussion. (For a far less jazzy interpretation, listen to her 1976 Last Waltz rendition, backed by Robbie Robertson & The Band).

 

Still, my favourite version is probably this early take – live from singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot’s front room, with Bob Dylan & Roger McGuinn hanging around in the background:

 

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• Coyote (live @ Gordon Lightfoot’s) – Joni Mitchell (1975):

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“Either he’s going to have to stand and fight,
Or take off out of here,
I tried to run away myself,
To run away and wrestle with my ego,
With this, this flame…”

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(If you’re curious what Sam Shepard made of Joni…here’s what he wrote in his own tour diary: “[She] just walks out with a plain guitar, a beret, and a history of word-collage. Every single time the place goes up in smoke like a brush fire. She stands there in the midst of it, making believe she’s tuning an already well-adjusted guitar until the place calms down…[Joni’s] merged into a unique jazz structure with lyric and rhythmic construction, and even managed to bite the masses in the ear with it.”)

 

• NUMBERS •

	6str	5str	4str	3str	2str	1str
Note	C	G	D	F	C	E
Alteration	-4	-2	0	-2	+1	0
Tension (%)	-37	-21	0	-21	+12	0
Freq. (Hz)	65	98	147	175	262	330
Pattern (>)	7	7	3	7	4	–
Semitones	0	7	14	17	24	28
Intervals	1	5	2	4	1	3

• See my Tunings Megatable for further such nerdery: more numbers, intervallic relations, comparative methods, etc. And to any genuine vibratory scientists reading: please critique my DIY analysis!

• RELATED •

—Associated tunings: proximities of shape, concept, context, etc…

• Hejira (this with 1str -4, 2str -5): loosened high strings
• Atta’s C: island arrangement with the same outer four
• Pink Moon: transatlantic folk with the same high side

• MORE INFO •

—Further learnings: sources, readings, lessons, other onward links…

• Joni’s tunings: read more about her intriguing approaches to winding the pegs in my article Stringed canvas: Joni Mitchell’s musico-visual imagination (“A painter…has the joy of creating it, it hangs on a wall, and somebody buys it, and somebody buys it again, or maybe nobody buys it and it sits up in a loft until he dies. But nobody ever said to Van Gogh, ‘paint Starry Night again, man!’ You know? He painted it, and that was it.”)
• Non-metaphorical coyotes: why did Joni name the track after this close wolf-cousin? We can’t know for sure, but it certainly seems to fit those roaming, desert vibes – watch the canis latrans in action on BBC Earth and the Smithsonian, and read more via the Maine Coyote Center (“the ancient Aztecs of Mexico named our native wild dog coyotl: a word of significant and reverential meaning…[They] lead complex social lives, with strict parameters regarding behavior within their immediate family and toward the other wild canines”) – and also have a listen to their own howling songs (“people have expressed to me a deep sense of loss when the songs of Coyote that they delighted in were silenced: when they were cruelly killed – and the silence was empty”)

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Header image: Joni in The Last Waltz (1978)