A romance written in the stars
I've got joy 'round my brain, wait and see
I've got joy 'round my brain, wait and see
I'm so happy I could die, I don't know the reason why
I've got joy 'round my brain, wait and see
Joy ’Round My Brain
By the time she was 16, Mimi had embarked on a solo singing career, writing her own songs and travelling across Europe playing her music. In Paris, she met - and fell in love with - the man whose tragic fate left an indelible mark on her life.
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| Mimi and Richard Fariña, backstage at the Newport Folk Festival in July, 1965 | Photo by David Gahr / Getty Images |
In 1964, Mimi met Richard Farina at a picnic organized by a friend, "one of the Harvard guys who came to Europe for their summer holidays and would drop by at the house to pick guitar." It was an expedition to the cathedral at Chartres and, for Mimi, it was a spectacular day: "We all basically packed into a car and sang our way there and it was the first day I ever got drunk. We went through the cathedral and it was gorgeous and went out to the fields with this big picnic we'd brought and we were singing and eating and handing the bottle around and I was so thrilled just to be out of the house and on my own. I was chainsmoking my mother's Kent cigarettes and drinking red wine and I hadn't been as happy as long as I could remember. Dick was telling jokes and being very entertaining and at one point I laughed so hard my sandwich spat out in his face, but he just kept talking and laughing and it made me laugh too. I didn't know it then, but I was falling in love."
An excerpt from Baby Let Me Follow You Down:
John Cooke was back from Pamplona, caught up in the magic of his new car. Like a mojo, you have to keep your Volvo working. He was in love with Mimi, as was Geno, Todd Stuart, Danny Chevalle, etc.Some of us were going on a picnic. I picked up Mimi and stopped by and picked up Dick and
Carolyn. I said, "Dick, Carolyn, this is Mimi Baez.
Mimi, this is Dick and Carolyn," all in the back of my Volvo.
Mimi was originally going to go with Todd Stuart on the back of his bike.
Mother said I couldn't go on a motorcycle, I was fifteen, so I went in the car, in the famous Volvo. I sat next to Dick and it was fun. Carolyn was on the other side. Alex Campbell was in front, and Cookie drove. It was very loud all the way. We drove out to Chartres and there was lots of wine drinking. We had a picnic all set. First, we went to the Cathedral and wandered all around. Dick was very flirtatious, but I didn't know it. I thought he was neat because he was a poet. Todd was somewhere parking his motorcycle — he finally arrived, but Dick was busy telling me all the intricacies of this and that, the demons and so on, in the church. I was fascinated, of course. Carolyn was sort of walking behind with her high heels and her scarf with a cold.
Then we went out to this field and had a picnic. I wasn't used to drinking, and I wasn't supposed to smoke at all, so I chain-smoked all day long and got very drunk, but I didn't realize it. And Dick
kept joking and I kept laughing.
At one point I spit out a whole sandwich in his face because I was laughing so hard. I was very embarrassed but nothing mattered, and the whole day was a real
high. We stopped in a cafe on the way home, and Alex and I danced a jig to some music that was on a television set, and we finally got home. It was pretty late, and I told mother about this wonderful day I had had. I went off to bed around four in the morning. I was throwing up and laughing.
In the morning she came in and said,"How are you?" and I said. "The funniest thing happened! I was up all night throwing up, but I was laughing. I mean it wasn't awful at all." She took a look at me, went out, came back with some juice, and said, "I think we're experiencing our first hangover."
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| Mimi Fariña in Paris | Photographer unknown |
In lighter moments, she would say that had been the key to his heart, which was altogether possible; he was always wonderfully off in the way he interpreted what might be romantic. Mimi was over the moon about Fariña.
He sent her a poem a few days later. In ‘The Field Near the Cathedral at Chartres’, he describes Mimi’s ‘sudden dance free of all design’ and the ‘tale in [her] dark body’s book’. He wooed her with letters and sometimes poetry - "Young girl, ou chose the amber coil of a wish" - using references that occur often in his writing.
What it lacks, perhaps, in poetic finesse it makes up for in feeling; Richard had married Carolyn Hester after an eighteen-day courtship. He was on the road in Europe with her when this all happened. After he met Mimi, Carolyn returned alone to the United Stated and the divorce was similarly speedy.
He was fun and smart and confident, an extraordinary character, who lived on the edge.
Joan Baez would describe him as: a mystical child of darkness-blatantly ambitious, lovable, impossible, charming, obnoxious, tirelessly active - a bright, talented, sheepish, tricky, curly-haired, man-child of darkness.
Born in Brooklyn, of Cuban-Irish ancestry, at 18 he is reputed to have been an IRA gunrunner and regularly visited pre-Castro Cuba.
He was close friends with the avant-garde novelist Thomas Pynchon. He was also a journalist and would-be novelist, a powerful singer, promising songwriter and played the dulcimer.
Like her sister Joanie, he was to powerfully influence the course of her life.
A year later, when she was 17, against her mother's and father's protestations, they married in secret, under the Napoleonic code (whatever that is) on a very small ceremony as Mimi describes it on an interview of 1988. Her family were wary of the older man.
"Everybody resented Dick by the time he really made an entrance. Even my one aunt who always
managed to find ways to tell me that life was okay, my most nonjudgmental aunt, said something about his— oh, what was the word? Taking advantage of being Joanie's sister."
managed to find ways to tell me that life was okay, my most nonjudgmental aunt, said something about his— oh, what was the word? Taking advantage of being Joanie's sister."
Her parents, hurt and disappointed at first, finally gave the union their blessing, throwing a wedding in Carmel, California.
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| Mimi and Richard Fariña - Wedding in Carmel |
"There were flowes in Mimi's hair, there was music from some local singers, and her sister Joan wrote and sang a song to her sister and her new husband. Dick and Mimi were happy together, and apparently Big Joan had overcome her objections. If she had not come completely around on Dick, at least she begun to appreciate the joy Mimi took in her husband." - excert from Sweet Judy Blue eyes, by Judy Collins.
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Mimi and Richard Fariña cut the cake. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of Mimi Farina. Source: Baby, let me follow you down : the illustrated story of the Cambridge folk years - by Eric Von Schmidt |
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| Mimi and Richard Fariña cut the wedding cake. Photographer unknown |
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| Mimi and Richard Fariña cut the cake. Photographer unknown |
The couple moved to a one-room cabin in Carmel near Joan's house, where "Dick was finishing his book - Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me (1966) - and I was learning to be a housewife, taking dance and teaching some kids. He would write during the day and in the evening we would make dinner and music." With her sister fast acquiring a reputation as the queen of folk music, there was much interest in Mimi's sensual voice, and the antics of her hell-raising husband.
They moved to Cambridge for a year, intending to get back to Europe, but returned instead to California when her sister Joan asked them to help her found a school, the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence. "And the Big Sur Folk Festival came into being and that was when the record executives came - both Vanguard and Elektra asked us to be on their label. From the start it was very heady and it never let up. Dick's energy was unbelievable."
Their music was lyrical and relatively sophisticated for the time, ranging from serene love songs to charged social issues, and traditional interpretations to satirical observations, drawing on a range of influences from blues to Celtic music. One of their most controversial songs, Morgan, The Pirate, was interpreted as a disdainful commentary on Bob Dylan's progression from folk to rock.
The Fariñas recorded two exceptional albums, both with Vanguard - Celebration for a Grey Day which included Richard's classic "Pack Up Your Sorrows" and was chosen one of the top 10 folk albums of 1965 by the New York Times, and Reflections in a Crystal Wind. Richard finished his novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, a classic of the 1960s, which his friend Thomas Pynchon (who dedicated Gravity's Rainbow to Farina) described as a book that "comes on like the Hallelujah Chorus done by 200 kazoo players with perfect pitch, I mean strong, swinging, skillful and reverent - but also with the fine brassy buzz of irreverence in there too."
An impossible act to follow
Two days after its publication, on Mimi's 21st birthday, Farina was thrown from a speeding motorcycle and killed.
"The world shattered in front of me," she says with simple reserve, 29 years later, still using his name, a photo of him still prominent in her office at Bread & Roses. She would later publish a collection of his shorter works, Long Time Coming and a Long Time Gone, with a foreword by her sister and her own notes introducing each piece. And there would be two posthumous albums, Memories in 1967 and The Best of Mimi and Richard Fariña in 1970.
“It was true that ever since the day
her crazy man had passed away
to the land of poet's pride,
she laughed and talked alot
with new people on the block
but always at evening time she cried.”
Sweet Sir Galahad, Joan Baez
Mimi was devastated. Not only had she and Richard established a carreer together as folk singers and recording artists, she had lived completely in his shadow, letting him make all her decisions for her. After his death, Mimi struck Joan Baez as being perpetually on the brink of suicide, waking up in the middle of the night screaming for help and banging on the floor with her shoe until neighbors came to her aid.
Opinion (as if i had the right to have one)
I don't know where i read it but i recall he knew how to cook very well, added lots of garlic to the food and somewhere in time and space he threw a coocked chicken out of a window. (lovely). From what i've read about his marriage with Caroline Hester he seemed a liiittle bit crontoller, that gun episode was just awfull and certainly a massive red flag. But he was also young. They both were.
I do believe he made Mimi very happy - so that's enough for me to like him. Her life would have been completely diferent if he didn't die. If they would mantain the marriage? I don't know, but they loved each other's company so much i do believe so. They would have sang for much longer, Dylan would have had a lot of competition, but i think at some point Mimi would have to find herself along the way, and to take an active role in her life (or perhaps not, who knows), and i'm not sure how Dick would have dealt with this. I know it was not rainbows and butterflies all the time, but they loved each other so much it just makes me happy to know the time they had together was happy for both despite the initial lack of suport from the family. I know wherever they are, they're together.
A question from an interview by Gary James
Mimi's answer
I have no idea, but of course I have always fantasized that we would have been able to maintain the marriage and the career. He was so multi-talented that my guess is we would have explored many different art forms. When he died, he had written a play that I was to be in. He included me in a lot of his creative works, so I suspect that some other doors might've opened for me that haven't, because of my being alone and not being that aggressive, so I say. Some people think I'm quite aggressive.
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| Richard and Mimi Fariña |
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| Richard and Mimi Fariña, Diana Davies Photography | Smithsonian Archives |
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| Mimi and Richard Fariña |
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| Richard and Mimi Fariña, Joan Baez and Joan Senior |
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| Mimi and Richard Fariña |
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| Mimi and Richard Fariña |
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Mimi, Richard and Lush | Photo by Richie Frizzell, from, Baby, Let Me Follow You Down |
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| Mimi and Richard Fariña |
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| Mimi and Richard Fariña |
As gentle tides go rolling by,
Along the salt sea strand
The colours blend and roll as one
Together in the sand.
And often do the winds entwine
Do send their distant call,
The quiet joys of brotherhood,
And love is lord of all.
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| The Broadside, Volume IV, No.5 - April 28, 1965 |
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| "A Couple Who Combine Scores of Talents" by John L. Wasserman - San Francisco Chronicle, April 15, 1966, p.52. | Source - Richard and Mimi Website by Douglas Cooke ____________ |
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| "It's Richard Farina! He's Here! Call of a Dulcimer Rebel" by Michael Grieg - San Francisco Chronicle, April 28, 1966, p.3. - part 1 | Source - Richard and Mimi Website by Douglas Cooke |
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| "It's Richard Farina! He's Here! Call of a Dulcimer Rebel" by Michael Grieg - San Francisco Chronicle, April 28, 1966, p.3. - part 2 | Source - Richard and Mimi Website by Douglas Cooke |
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