Kelly Dale Anderson, now known as Kilauren Gibb, is the biological daughter of legendary singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell.
Mitchell had Kelly Dale Anderson when she was a 20-year-old college student, with no support from her parents or her then-partner.
Upon giving birth, Mitchell made the painful decision to put her infant daughter up for adoption. It wasn’t until thirty years later that Mitchell reconnected with her daughter. This is their story.
Why Did Joni Mitchell Put Kelly Dale Anderson Up for Adoption?
Joni Mitchell, then known as Joan Anderson, was a struggling folk singer when she put her daughter up for adoption in 1965.
She had recently moved to Toronto and was struggling financially, unable to support herself while trying to establish her name in the music scene.
Brad MacMath, the father of her daughter and her then-boyfriend, reportedly didn’t want to be a father and left Mitchell when she was three months pregnant. “She definitely wanted to have it,” MacMath, a Regina native, recalled during a follow-up interview.
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He mentioned that they “didn’t really want to get married and settle down” and that seeing his friends taking care of their kids didn’t look too exciting. Thus, he decided to leave the relationship.
Mitchell hadn’t had the support of her parents, either. “The scandal was so intense. A daughter could do nothing more disgraceful. It ruined you in a social sense. You have no idea what the stigma was. It was like you murdered somebody,” she said during a 1997 interview with LA Times.
Abandoned, Mitchell was left to fend for herself. She lived in an attic room with no money and limited resources during a harsh winter and knew that this wasn’t the life she wanted her child to grow up in.
Mitchell initially attempted to create a stable home by marrying folk singer Chuck Mitchell, but the marriage ended after only a month. “He chickened out, I chickened out. The marriage had no basis, except to provide a home for the baby.”
Unable to find a viable way to raise her daughter, she made the painful choice to give her up for adoption. This decision haunted Mitchell for years and greatly influenced her music, including the song “Little Green” from her iconic 1971 album Blue. One of the verses goes as follows:
“Child with a child pretending
Weary of lies you are sending home
So you sign all the papers in the family name
You’re sad, and you’re sorry, but you’re not ashamed
Little Green, have a happy ending.”
Joni Mitchell began gaining prominence after her debut album, Song to a Seagull, which was released in 1968. Her breakthrough came when Judy Collins recorded her song Both Sides Now, which became a huge hit in 1968.
Despite her fame, Mitchell kept her daughter’s adoption a secret for decades. But in 1993, Mitchell’s college roommate sold her story to a British Tabloid. Though Mitchell felt betrayed and angry, she couldn’t hate her roommate for too long as the story brought visibility to her decades-old search for her daughter.
How Did Joni Mitchell and Kelly Dale Anderson Reunite?
Kelly Dale Anderson, who was renamed Kilauren Gibb by her adoptive parents David and Ida Gibb when she was eight months old, was just as fastidious with her search as her mother.
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Kilauren Gibb didn’t find out she was adopted until many years later. She’d look at her family’s album and realize there were no pictures of her before she was eight months old. Her adoptive parents told her the truth when she was a teenager, and it was then that she began searching for her biological mother.
Gibb found out about her mother purely by chance. One of Gibb’s friends told her about Mitchell and how Mitchell has been searching for her long-lost daughter for decades now. She suggested that she look her up and get in touch because some of the details lined up too perfectly, and they shared similar features. This happened in 1997, 32 years after the adoption.
“The more I read, the more I realized how alike we were,” Gibb told The Toronto Star in a 1997 interview.
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Gibb decided to reach out and contacted Mitchell’s manager to arrange a meeting. Mitchell immediately agreed, and Gibb flew to Los Angeles with her three-year-old son, Marlin, to meet her in person. When they finally met, the connection was instant. “It’s kind of crazy,” Gibb said. “We met, and it clicked. It was like we never separated!”
Upon meeting, Mitchell poured her heart into Gibb. She told Gibb how sorry she was for giving her up and how she wanted nothing but to keep her, but couldn’t because she was broke at the time.
She then asked about Gibb’s childhood, to which Gibb assured her that she had a fantastic life. “It was a great childhood, probably the best. I’m really happy that I got my family to raise me in a down-to-earth style. I’ll always be grateful for that.”
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Gibb met her biological father, Brad MacMath, in 2000. To his credit, MacMath was grateful that Gibb reached out.
“I was always sort of looking for her on the street, even though I didn’t know it,” MacMath said. He also mentioned that having a grown daughter and grandson appear out of nowhere was “absolutely amazing.”
According to Kilauren Gibb’s Facebook, she is currently self-employed in Toronto. Until this year, she continued to update and occasionally posted posts related to her birth mother Joni Mitchell. In 2021, she posted a photo of her mother when she was young.
Final Thoughts
Kelly Dale Anderson, renamed Kilauren Gibb by her adoptive parents, is singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell’s biological daughter. Mitchel had to give Gibb up for adoption in 1965 due to financial circumstances and began looking for her as soon as her career in the music industry took off. The mother and daughter reunited in 1997 and have been in contact ever since.
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