Richard George Fariña (March 8, 1937 – April 30, 1966) was an American folksinger, songwriter, poet and novelist.
Fariña was born in Brooklyn, New York, United States, the son of an Irish mother, Theresa Crozier, and a Cuban father of Galician origin, also named Richard Fariña. He grew up in the Flatbush neighbourhood of Brooklyn and attended Brooklyn Technical High School. He earned an academic scholarship to Cornell University, starting as engineering major, but later switching to English.
While at Cornell he published short stories for local literary magazines and for national periodicals, including Transatlantic Review and Mademoiselle. Fariña became good friends with Thomas Pynchon, David Shetzline, and Peter Yarrow while at Cornell. He was suspended for alleged participation in a student demonstration against campus regulations, and although he later resumed his status as a student, he dropped out in 1959, just before graduation.
On returning to Manhattan, Fariña became a regular patron of the White Horse Tavern, the well-known Greenwich Village tavern frequented by poets, artists, and folksingers, where he befriended Tommy Makem. It was there that he met Carolyn Hester, a successful folk singer. They married 18 days later. Fariña appointed himself Hester's agent; they toured worldwide while Fariña worked on his novel and Carolyn performed gigs.
Fariña was present when Hester recorded her third album at Columbia studios during September 1961, where a then-little-known Bob Dylan played the harmonica on several tracks. Fariña became a good friend of Dylan; their friendship is a major topic of David Hajdu's book, Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña.
Fariña then travelled to Europe, where he met Mimi Baez, the teenage sister of Joan Baez, in the spring of 1962. Hester divorced Fariña soon thereafter, and Fariña married 17-year-old Mimi in April 1963. Thomas Pynchon was the best man. They moved to a small cabin in Carmel, California, where they composed songs with a guitar and Appalachian dulcimer. They debuted their act as "Richard & Mimi Fariña" at the Big Sur Folk Festival in 1964 and signed a contract with Vanguard Records.
They recorded their first album, Celebrations for a Grey Day (released under the name Mimi & Richard Fariña), in 1965, with the help of Bruce Langhorne, who had previously played for Dylan. During the brief life of Richard Fariña, the couple released only one other album, Reflections in a Crystal Wind, also in 1965. A third album, Memories, was issued in 1968, after his death.
Fariña, like Dylan and others of this time, was considered a protest singer, and several of his songs are overtly political. Several critics have considered Fariña to be a major folk music talent of the 1960s. His best-known songs are "Pack Up Your Sorrows" and "Birmingham Sunday", the latter of which was recorded by Joan Baez and became better known after it became the theme song for Spike Lee's film 4 Little Girls, a documentary about the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. "Birmingham Sunday" was also recorded by Rhiannon Giddens in 2017, on her album "Freedom Highway." He also wrote "The Quiet Joys of Brotherhood", which was recorded by Sandy Denny.
On April 30, 1966, two days after the publication of his novel, Fariña attended a book-signing ceremony at a Carmel Valley Village bookstore, the Thunderbird. Later that day, while at a party to celebrate his wife Mimi Fariña's twenty-first birthday, Fariña saw a guest with a motorcycle, who later gave Fariña a ride up Carmel Valley Road, heading east toward the rural Cachagua area of Carmel Valley.
At an S-turn the driver lost control. The motorcycle tipped over on the right side of the road, came back to the other side, and tore through a barbed wire fence into a field where a small vineyard now exists. The driver survived, but Fariña was killed instantly. According to Pynchon's preface to Been Down..., the police said the motorcycle must have been travelling at 90 miles per hour (140 km/h), even though "a prudent speed" would have been 30 miles per hour (48 km/h). Fariña is buried in a simple grave, its marker emblazoned with a peace sign, at Monterey City Cemetery in Monterey, California.
Mimi curated his legacy with the posthumous album legacy and an anthology of his unpublished essays and poems, and she sang again -- as she had done when a teenager -- with her sister Joan. She married again in '68 (she was still just 23) and started a charitable organisation in '74. She recorded a solo album in '85 and was politically active a; her life, until she died in 2001 at age 56.
(Edited from Wikipedia & Elsewhere.co.nz)