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| Richard Fariña |
It
hardly seems possible now but 50 years ago tomorrow, April 30, 1966 Richard Fariña hopped on the
back of a friend’s motorcycle for a quick joy ride in the middle of a party
celebrating the publication of his first novel and his wife’s birthday. Only 29 years old, he was one of the most promising young writers and musicians in America. A
few minutes later he was dead.
That kind of tragic
early death has made legends and
cultural icons out of figures like James
Dean. But despite a devoted
cult following, mostly associated with the fans of his sister in law
Joan Baez and wife Mimi Fariña, his star has faded. Which is too bad. He was a very talented man who led the sort of swashbuckling life that should have attracted a lot of attention.
Partly his obscurity
lies in his own vagueness on the details of his biography. As an artist, he felt free to invent himself and he often confabulated real experiences with romantic extrapolations from their possibilities. He was not the first to do so. Ernest
Hemingway built a Nobel Prize winning
career convincing his readers
that he was really the hero of some
of his most famous novels. Woody
Guthrie’s “autobiography” Bound
for Glory was really a novel
about a character named Woody
Guthrie. Fariña’s friend and contemporary Bob Dylan re-created himself chameleon like until
there was almost no remaining connection
to Bobby Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minnesota.
This is what we think we know.
Fariña was born on March 8, 1937 in the Flatbush
neighborhood of Brooklyn, a stew of ethnicities. His father was Cuban and his mother Irish.
He would build a mythos on both of
these heritages. In childhood
he spent some summers with his father’s family in Cuba. He made his
first trip the British Isles, and his mother’s Ulster in 1953
while still in high school.
Back in Brooklyn, the boy was a star pupil in the Catholic and public schools he attended. In
January of 1955 he graduated from the elite Brooklyn Technical High School,
where he was President of the General
Organization which directed all extra-curricular
activities at the school, Chief
Justice of the Student Court, and had his own column in the school
newspaper.
Returning to Northern Ireland Fariña
became in some way involved—and may have even joined—the Irish
Republican Army (IRA). He may, or may not, have taken part in active operations in the
IRA’s low level guerilla warfare
against the British “occupation”
of the North. He incorporated
the experience in short stories he promoted as autobiographical.
With the help of a prestigious Regent’s
Scholarship—a full ride—he attended Cornell University. At
the urging of his father he began engineering
studies but quickly grew bored and switched to an English
major. He was crafting short stories and poems as an undergraduate as
well as being a part of a thriving
literary community on campus that included his closest friend, the future novelist Thomas Pynchon.
In his junior
year Fariña made national headlines
when he was charged with riot in a student protest against restrictions on female students led by
his friend Kilpatrick Sale. Despite what Sale considered peripheral involvement, he became the face of a minor cause célèbre
when 22 students were placed on trial by
the school. Eventually he and Sale were “paroled” and allowed to remain
in school.
Although Fariña returned to Cornell for
his senior year, he dropped out in
1959 before graduation. His college life, however, became the fodder for the novel Been Down So
Long it Looks like Up to Me.
After leaving school, he took another trip to his
ancestral Cuba, then on the cusp of revolution.
He soaked up the atmosphere and aura of intrigue in Havana and may have even made contact with and done some minor collaboration with revolutionary cells in the city.
Soon back in New York he took a job offer as a copywriter at the top advertising agency in the city, J.
Walter Thompson. Was he “selling
out” or just following the familiar
career path of some of his literary heroes like F. Scott Fitzgerald?
No matter. He was soon bored, restless, and alienated. He started to submit his stories and poems to literary magazines.
Previously a jazz aficionado, Farina began
to haunt bohemian Greenwich
Village and particularly the rich, socially
conscious folk music scene that seemed to be staking out a new cutting edge in American culture. The legendary White Horse Tavern was
a special haunt. There he fell in with the Tommy Makem and
the Clancy Brothers. He was particularly close to the Northern
Irishman Makem, with who he would drink
and sing all of the old rebel songs.
Within a very short period of time he was drawn into the world, if only on its periphery. He gave up the lucrative advertising agency job and
was soon scrounging with the rest of
the Village Beats.
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| Carolyn Hester. |
In 1960 he re-connected with beautiful folk
singer Carolyn Hester, then a leading
star of the folk-revival scene
who he had first encountered during a drunken evening of rebel song with Makem
at the White Horse the year before. After an intense 17 day courtship the two married.
Without a job Fariña appointed himself Hester’s manager.
What many saw as a loving collaboration,
others viewed as his crude cashing in on a meal ticket.
Although not previously a performer,
he soon put himself of stage between her sets reading his poetry
with a brooding intensity. He was present in the studio when Hester recorded her third album with the then virtually unknown Bob Dylan sitting in on mouth harp. It was
the beginning of a close personal relationship with Dylan and his set.
Legendary Appalachian traditional folk artist Jean Ritchie introduced him to the simplest of all folk instruments, the three string mountain
dulcimer. When he and Hester briefly took up residence in Charlottesville, Virginia to study traditional music, Ritchie gave
him a dulcimer of his own. Soon he was sitting up on stage with Hester accompanying her on the instrument and
occasionally singing harmonies.
The couple toured
widely in the United States and then in Europe, particularly Scotland
and the British Isles. He got
himself co-billed with Hester at the
Edinburgh Folk Festival and separately
recorded a four song EP with the popular Scottish duo Rory and Alex McEwen
despite having barely mastered his
new instrument. Hester grew increasingly
resentful of his relentless
self-promotion and intrusion
into her career.
After he met the beautiful 16 year Mimi Baez, sister of rising folk star Joan and openly flirting with her at a summer picnic with fellow musicians in
the French countryside, Carolyn abandoned her husband in Europe, returned to the states to record a new
album without him, and filed for a hasty
divorce.
The affair
between Fariña and Mimi blossomed despite an eight year age difference. Mimi’s stunning beauty and the Latin/Celtic
heritage they shared—her father was Mexican and
mother Scottish—had him hooked on
her. His charm, intensity, and way with words won her heart. The couple was secretly married in Paris, without
the knowledge of her family because of her youth.
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| Mimi and Richard on their wedding day. |
They publicly married in April of 1963 with Pynchon
as Fariña’s best man and Joan and
the Baez family in attendance. By that time Mimi was just 17. They set-up housekeeping in California’s
Big Sur in picturesque Carmel
near Joan and began on collaborating
on new songs for a stage act and recordings. Mimi wrote the melodies, sometimes with her sister,
and he wrote the words, some of them adapted
from previous poems.
This time spent in California, along with frequent trips back to New York where
the couple immersed themselves in the circle around Dylan and Joan, was filled
with hours of music. Jamming regularly
with friends and honing his craft.
Fariña was becoming the musician he only
pretended to be with Carolyn Hester.
All this time he had also been working his novel
and getting his stories published in increasingly
prestigious magazines.
The young couple debuted their act as Richard and Mimi Fariña at the Big
Sur Folk Festival in 1964. Their ecstatic
reception there won a contract
with Joan’s record label Vanguard.
They recorded their first album that fall with the help of old friend, guitarist Bruce Langhorne who
had worked with Dylan.
Awaiting the album release they played the folk circuit around Cambridge and
Boston that winter where they became favorites for their unique blend of
Appalachian inspired songs, lyrical expressions of ecstatic joy, death obsessions, and strong protest music.
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| Celebrations for a Grey Day, Richard and Mimi's first album. |
The album, Celebrations for a Grey Day,
was released in April of 1965. Surprisingly, almost half the songs on the
album were instrumentals which showed off how he had advanced on his simple
instrument and learned to weave it
with Mimi’s supple guitar work with unique rhythms. Songs on the
album include their most familiar tune, Pack Up Your Sorrows, the
more complex Reno, Nevada, Richard’s ballad of Civil
Rights martyrs Michael, Andrew, and James, and the title song.
Although folk music was being eclipsed on the radio and
in many college dormitories by the British
Invasion and rise of a new,
sophisticated form of rock and roll, Celebrations for a Grey Day was
a solid hit among folk fans. I
owned a copy and it was among half a
dozen albums that I nearly wore out.
Richard and Mimi became true folk music super stars with their appearance at
the Newport Folk Festival. They won awards in a Broadside magazine poll in three
categories—Best Group, Best Newcomers, and Best Female
Vocalist.
Those were heady days. Richard felt he had
finally won recognition after years
of struggling in artistic obscurity.
They quickly began work on a second album, Reflections
in a Crystal Wind. This album was even more ambitious, and featured much more of
Richard lyrics. Memorable songs included Chrysanthemum, Sell-Out
Agitation Waltz, Hard-Loving Loser, House Un-American Blues Dream, Miles, and
Children of Darkness. It was, quite simply, a masterpiece.
Fariña announced
a reduction of public performance to concentrate on writing, both music and
finally finishing the manuscript of Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me
with which he had been struggling
intermittently since 1961. But he had new-found confidence in himself as a writer, not just a character in the role of a writer.
His new fame also assured that major publishers would be interested in the manuscript. He completed a final draft in six intense
months of work and Random House picked
it up.
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Richard and Mimi celebrating the launch of the
book in New York City with all of their friends with a major book signing and reading, performed on Pete
Seeger’s Rainbow Quest TV
show, and celebrated his 29th birthday with his family in Brooklyn.
They flew
back to California for a triumphant
appearance at the San Francisco Folk Festival and then returned to
Carmel. April 30 the day started off with a laid back book signing at a local
bookstore and continued at the combination book and birthday party for Mimi
at their home that afternoon.
Then, in the midst of the celebrations, he was
dead in a motorcycle crash.
Mimi, just turned 21, was devastated.
Sister Joan, who had grown very fond
of Richard and with whom she had collaborated
in the establishment of her Institute
for the Study of Non-Violent Action was also shaken, but felt the need to be strong for her sister.
With the author young and dead, his book became a success, especially on the
college campuses where some regarded
it as sort of a manual.
Pynchon thought it was a work of genius
which spoke for a generation, “coming on like the Hallelujah Chorus done by
200 kazoo players with perfect pitch... hilarious, chilling, sexy, profound,
maniacal, beautiful, and outrageous all at the same time.”
Today many academic
dismiss the book as little more
than a cultural artifact of its
era. Others believe it stands with the work of Terry Southern,
Richard Brautigan, Tom Robbins, and Pynchon himself as the literary legacy of a generation.
Joan and Mimi consoled themselves by preserving
Richard’s memory. Together they assembled
a posthumous album which included previously unreleased material and
songs from an unfinished rock album
that Richard was producing for
Joan. Songs include Joy Round My Brain, a stunning a capella traditional sea
chantey Blood Red Roses, Morgan the Pirate, and All the
World Has Gone By.
Still later, Joan produced a tribute album that included Richard’s powerful ballad, Birmingham Sunday and her own salute
to Richard and to Mimi’s eventual recovery
and remarriage, Sweet Sir
Galahad.
Together Mimi and Joan collected and got to publication an anthology of his later
short stories and poems. Long Time Coming and a Long Time Gone
contains some very interesting writing.
Pynchon memorialized his friend in a moving essay and by dedicating his second novel, Gravity’s
Rainbow to his memory.
Despite all of this, fame is fleeting, and Richard Fariña is mostly cherished in the fading
memories of a generation that recalls his brief burst of glory.
The Quiet Joys of Brotherhood was a
poem was written during the period when he was still in Europe. It was picked up and set to music by Sandy Denny of the seminal English
Folk/Rock group Fairport Convention and recorded on her first solo
album. Richard and Mimi recorded a slightly different version in a
session which became the first cut
on the posthumous album.
The Quiet Joys of Brotherhood
Where gentle tides go rolling by
Along the salt-sea strand The colors blend and roll as one Together in the sand And often do the winds entwine To send their distant call The quiet joys of brotherhood When love is lord of all Where oat and wheat together rise Along the common ground The mare and stallion light and dark Have thunder in their sound The rainbow sign, the blended flood Still have my heart enthralled The quiet joys of brotherhood When love is lord of all But men have come to plow the tides The oat lies on the ground I hear their fires in the field They drive the stallion down The roses bleed, both light and dark The winds do seldom call The running sands recall the time When love was lord of all
—Richard Fariña
Birmingham
Sunday
Come round by my side and I’ll sing you a song.
I’ll sing it so softly, it’ll do no one wrong. On Birmingham Sunday the blood ran like wine, And the choirs kept singing of Freedom. That cold autumn morning no eyes saw the sun, And Addie Mae Collins, her number was one. At an old Baptist church there was no need to run. And the choirs kept singing of Freedom, The clouds they were grey and the autumn winds blew, And Denise McNair brought the number to two. The falcon of death was a creature they knew, And the choirs kept singing of Freedom, The church it was crowded, but no one could see That Cynthia Wesley’s dark number was three. Her prayers and her feelings would shame you and me. And the choirs kept singing of Freedom. Young Carol Robertson entered the door And the number her killers had given was four. She asked for a blessing but asked for no more, And the choirs kept singing of Freedom. On Birmingham Sunday a noise shook the ground. And people all over the earth turned around. For no one recalled a more cowardly sound. And the choirs kept singing of Freedom. The men in the forest they once asked of me, How many black berries grew in the Blue Sea. And I asked them right with a tear in my eye. How many dark ships in the forest? The Sunday has come and the Sunday has gone. And I can’t do much more than to sing you a song. I'll sing it so softly, it’ll do no one wrong. And the choirs keep singing of Freedom.
—Richard Fariña
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