The Riff That Flew Three Times: Joni Mitchell, Nazareth, and the Long Shadow of Barracuda

Riff genealogy is usually argued in court. This one was settled backstage, with a shrug and a grudge, and it runs through three artists who could not sound less alike.

Start in June 1971. Joni Mitchell releases Blue. Track eight is “This Flight Tonight,” two minutes and fifty one seconds of guitar, voice and Sneaky Pete Kleinow’s pedal steel. It is a song about regret at 30,000 feet, an argument with yourself after you have already boarded. There is no riff in it. There is barely a rhythm section.

Dunfermline gets hold of it

Nazareth were Scottish, loud, and completely uninterested in reverence. Bassist Pete Agnew has said the band wore out Blue in the van on tour, and that “This Flight Tonight” was the favourite. In 1973 they cut it for Loud ‘n’ Proud, produced by Roger Glover, freshly out of Deep Purple. What came out was not a cover so much as a demolition and rebuild: Dan McCafferty’s sandpaper howl on top, and underneath it a chugging, palm muted guitar figure that has almost nothing to do with Mitchell’s original chords.

It worked commercially in a way nobody planned. Number 11 in the UK, number 2 in Austria, number 5 in Switzerland, and number 1 in West Germany.

The best part of the story is Mitchell’s own reaction. Nazareth ran into her at A&M studios the week the single dropped and told her what they had done. Agnew’s recollection of her response is one line long, and it is perfect: “What, with a rock band?” She then heard it and loved it. Later, at a London show, she reportedly introduced her own song to the audience as a Nazareth song.

That is the rarest thing in this entire lineage: an author giving away ownership on purpose.

Seattle takes the chug

Four years later, Heart were opening for Nazareth in Europe. Nancy Wilson has been explicit about what happened next. The riff Heart built “Barracuda” on, released in 1977 on Little Queen, came out of the Nazareth arrangement of a Joni Mitchell song. In her telling, when the two bands crossed paths again, Nazareth were not delighted. The complaint was blunt: you took our riff.

Wilson’s defence is the only honest one available to any guitarist: you borrow from what you love and make it your own. It is also worth saying that the palm muted gallop is not a Nazareth invention. It is a shared dialect of heavy rock, audible in Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath before 1973. What Nazareth owned was a specific gesture. What Heart did was weaponise it.

Because “Barracuda” is not a song about a riff. Ann Wilson wrote the lyric in genuine rage, after Mushroom Records ran a promotional campaign that insinuated the Wilson sisters were lovers, and a promoter walked into her dressing room and asked how her “lover” was. She went back to her hotel and wrote. The result is a song that sounds like it is chasing someone down a corridor, which is exactly what it is.

So the lineage reads: a folk confession becomes a hard rock single becomes a revenge anthem. Each step keeps the mechanics and throws away the meaning.

The fourth flight

Which brings us to July 2026 and a Calgary trio.

Jade Elephant, who won Rock Recording of the Year at the YYC Music Awards in 2025, have just released a version of “Barracuda” with Canadian singer Kate Stevens. Kyle Tenove takes on the Ann Wilson vocal line, which is either brave or reckless and possibly both.

Here is why it is worth hearing anyway. A cover of “Barracuda” is a cover of a song that was itself built on a cover. The riff has now been handed from a Canadian folk singer to a Scottish hard rock band to two sisters from Seattle and back to a Canadian band fifty five years later. It has crossed genre, gender, decade and border, and it still does the same thing to a room.

Nazareth were annoyed. Joni Mitchell was delighted. Both reactions were correct. That tension is the whole history of the electric guitar in one anecdote: nothing in this music is owned, only borrowed loudly enough that the next person hears it.

The only real crime is doing nothing with what you took.

Jade Elephant discovered via Brian Heason (HBM Promotions / Music Plugger).