Pack up your sorrows
We retrace the story of Mimi and Richard Fariña, little-known authors of a couple of albums that were hugely important in defining the shift from the straightforward revival of American folk tradition to what would go down in history as "folk-rock"
by
Francesco Nunziata
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Straddling the Fifties and Sixties, while popular music was caught between the fleeting teen-idol phenomenon, the last embers of rock'n'roll and the first stirrings of what would later be known as surf-music, a phenomenon arose that was destined to profoundly shape the genesis of rock music: the "folk-revival." Its roots went back at least to the Twenties, when researchers and ordinary enthusiasts began field-recording the traditional songs of farmers and other working people. A music once passed down by oral tradition crystallized over the years into reproducible forms, spreading first through the advent of the gramophone, and then through radio and television.
In the following decade, in New York's Greenwich Village, musicians such as Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax crossed paths, sharing ideas and passions and, in turn, breathing new life into the reappraisal of folk music — a process that, little by little, came to involve pretty much every state in the union, California included, of course. There, around the first half of the Sixties, the husband-and-wife duo Mimi and Richard Fariña were also active, the makers of a couple of albums hugely important in defining the shift from the straightforward revival of American folk tradition to what would go down in history as "folk-rock."
Margarita Mimi Baez, known to everyone simply as Mimi, was born in Palo Alto, California, on April 30, 1945. Inspired by her older sister Joan's passion for music, she learned to play violin and guitar, often performing alongside her in front of small audiences of relatives. Mimi loved singing too, but she soon realized she couldn't match her sister's talent, so she chose instead to deepen her study of those stringed instruments. The encounter that changed her life was with Richard Fariña, a budding writer of New York origins (he was in fact born in the Big Apple on March 8, 1937), affectionately called Dick by his friends.
A rebellious, anticonformist spirit, the son of a Cuban inventor and an Irish woman devoted to mysticism, parents who had dragged him around the world and had him educated by private tutors, Richard had been expelled from Cornell University for taking part in a protest against the overly repressive rules governing daily campus life. Much of the atmosphere of that period would later be transfigured in his only novel, "Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me", published in 1966 with the support of his writer friend Thomas Pynchon and translated into Italian under the title "Così giù che mi sembra di star su". The protagonist, Gnossos Pappadopolis, is a proto-hippie college student who, like a new-age Homer, sails the turbulent "seas" of a reality in constant upheaval, moving with detachment and anarchic spirit through psychedelic drugs, sex, music, pop culture and rebellion against the Establishment. Gnossos Pappadopolis is in some ways Fariña's own alter ego, as he would be remembered by C. Michael Curtis, his college roommate: "I think he cultivated an aura of mystery with a certain awareness. He liked to make people believe he had lived a dangerous life. He was capable of taking the most insignificant detail and fitting it into a much more elaborate scheme. It's hard to tell how much of this fantastic world he imagined was actually real, and how much of it was invented. I've known liars, and people with vivid imaginations too. He wasn't just imaginative, he was more than that. There was something childlike and uncontainable about his fantasies, and he never pushed them on you aggressively. He'd make vague allusions that got you thinking, he'd tell you: 'I can't talk about it', give you an enigmatic smile, and then move on and change the subject. Sometimes it seemed like he truly considered himself someone who had done all these things and whose life might really have been in danger. Other times it seemed like he wanted everyone to know that all his stories were huge tall tales."
At the dawn of the Sixties, with the folk-revival movement taking off, Richard began frequenting the Greenwich Village scene regularly, coming into contact with numerous figures, including a very young Bob Dylan, whom he met during the recording sessions for the third album by singer-songwriter Carolyn Hester, who had recently become Mrs. Fariña.
Although he nurtured literary dreams, in the shadow of William Blake, the Beat Generation and the poetry of English and Scottish ballads, Richard became fascinated with the dulcimer, a stringed instrument with a pronounced Middle Eastern timbre that is essentially an evolution of the psaltery, an ancient instrument dating back at least to the 4th century BC. It was precisely by using the dulcimer that Richard began setting some of his poems to music, setting his mind on becoming a singer-songwriter. It was in pursuit of that dream that, in early 1962, he flew to London. In the English capital, he managed to build a certain name for himself in the few folk clubs that gave space to up-and-coming singer-songwriters. Joined by his wife, Fariña saw his marriage fall apart when, during a trip to Paris, he met Mimi, who had recently moved to the French capital with her family. It was love at first sight between the two. For about a year, they exchanged passionate letters. Then, once he obtained a divorce from Hester, he proposed to her. They married in great secrecy, because Mimi's parents (she was then just seventeen) would never have given their consent to their daughter marrying that eccentric character who lived a hipster lifestyle.
A few months earlier, over a couple of days in January 1963, Richard had recorded, at the London record shop Dobell's Jazz Record Shop, the tracks of Dick Fariña & Eric Von Schmidt (14 tracks; 42:37), an LP released by Folklore Records. Across the fourteen tracks that make up the album, Richard and his fellow American Von Schmidt (who had made a name for himself as a singer-songwriter and painter on the Greenwich Village folk circuit) tackle a cappella pieces ("Johnny Cuckoo"), dance-songs (the medley of "Old Joe's Dulcimer"), work songs ("Jumping Judy") and detours into blues territory ("Cocaine", from the repertoire of Reverend Gary Davis, and "You Can Always Tell", inspired by Furry Lewis's "Dry Land Blues"). Only three originals feature, all written by Richard: "Xmas Island", "Stick With Me Baby" (nonetheless inspired by "I Will Turn Your Money Green", a 1928 Furry Lewis track) and "London Waltz", immature exercises straddling the line between folk and blues.
After returning home, Mimi and Richard went to live in California, sharing their musical passions as well. They began performing together, first in front of groups of friends, and then making their debut in 1964 at the Big Sur Folk Festival where, in front of about a thousand spectators, they played three songs, the only ones they had managed to properly rehearse in the preceding weeks: "Pack Up Your Sorrows", "The Falcon" and "Birmingham Sunday", the latter also accompanied by Joan Baez's singing. Despite the brevity of the set, the following day the Fariñas were contacted by Jac Holzman, who offered them a contract with Elektra. "I wanted them badly", Holzman himself would later recall. "They were dynamic, Mimi was mesmerizing and immensely musical, and Richard... was charismatic. He seemed like an elf, witty, and he was a great writer. Wherever he went, things lit up. Everyone around him felt better, because he always kept things moving. He kept everything animated."
There was a problem, though: when Richard had set his mind on becoming a singer-songwriter, he had managed to extract a half-promise from Vanguard, the same label as his sister-in-law Joan Baez. So, much to Holzman's dismay, the Fariñas ultimately signed with the New York label founded in 1950 by brothers Maynard and Seymour Solomon. Over the course of about two weeks in the autumn of 1964, at Olmstead Studios in Manhattan, the tracks for Celebrations For A Grey Day (13 tracks; 38:30) were recorded, the duo's first album, whose title was a variation on that of a poem Richard had once written for Hester.
A remarkably bold work for its time, built through a skillful mix of blues, folk, and Irish and Middle Eastern traditional music, Celebrations For A Grey Day (released in April 1965) also reflects the very free relationship Richard had developed with the dulcimer, an instrument that, in dialogue with Mimi's acoustic guitar (she used to favor modal tunings, alternating arpeggios and strumming, as she had learned in Paris, where she had heard many street musicians, some of Algerian origin), gives rise to what Robert Shelton of the New York Times, at the time, described as "an American-style raga sound".
Opening with the bright, breezy warmth of "Dandelion River Run", the album immediately delivers one of the duo's most magical moments with the bittersweet melancholy of "Pack Up Your Sorrows", then hypnotizing us with the circular melody and vocal interplay of "Michael, Andrew And James", the soothing "Another Country", and then compelling us to tap our feet during "One-Way Ticket" which, thanks to the addition of piano (Charles Small), bass (Russ Savakus) and electric guitar (Bruce Langhorne), stands alongside the more vibrant and menacing "Reno Nevada" (with a riff inspired by that of Herbie Hancock's "Watermelon Man") as one of the very earliest examples of mature electric folk-rock, even before Dylan made it his life's mission.
Among the instrumentals, worth noting are the crystalline textures of "Tommy Makem Fantasy" (dedicated by Richard to a singer-songwriter friend of Irish origin), the American primitivism infatuations of "Dog Blue", the medieval-sounding dances of the title track (which echoes the French nursery rhyme "Frere Jacques", known here in Italy as "Fra' Martino"), "Hamish", "V." (with Bruce Langhorne on percussion) and, finally, the brisk phrasing of "Tuileries".
No use cryin', talkin' to a stranger,
Namin’ the sorrow you’ve seen.
Too many bad times, too many sad times,
Nobody knows what you mean.
But if somehow you could pack up your sorrows,
And give them all to me,
You would lose them, I know how to use them,
Give them all to me
(“Pack Up Your Sorrows”)
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Celebrations For A Grey Day was further proof that many of the musicians who had grown up under the wing of folk no longer hid the fact that, over the years, they'd also been listening to some good, healthy rock'n'roll. As Richard Fariña himself wrote in the liner notes of Singer Songwriter Project, an anthology of singer-songwriters released that same year, 1965, by Elektra: "Folk music, through no fault of its own, led us astray into certain sympathies and nostalgic alliances with the so-called traditional past. The Thirties, the highways and open roads, the Great West, the mountains of the South, the blues, the unions, the Childe ballads [sic!]: all of it [...] left its mark, almost as if Chuck Berry and Batman had nothing to do with who we were, and Uncle Dave Macon or Horton Baker could tell us better. But the paradox was implicit: what the hell were rebels doing looking for roots? And for how long would people with a contemporary poetic sensibility be content to sing archaic material? Some of us had been listening to AM radio for years."
During the summer of 1965, the duo took part in the Newport Folk Festival, playing in the rain shortly before Dylan scandalized the audience by appearing on stage with an electric guitar.
The following December, trying to strike while the iron was hot, Richard and Mimi released their second album, Reflections In A Crystal Wind (13 tracks; 48:57), which cut the number of instrumentals from seven down to four, one of which, “Miles” (a tribute to the great jazz trumpeter), marked Mimi's first attempt at writing a song of her own.
This new work built on the groundwork laid by Celebrations For A Grey Day, offering more cohesive but overall less fascinating material. Even so, these grooves still managed to convey the sense of a conscious, creative act of working through folk material, in some cases (as, for example, in the Afro-Indian pachanga* of the instrumental “Dopico”) still playing the card of highly distinctive sonic fusions.
At the heart of the album, in the quartet of “Sell-Out Agitation Waltz”, “Hard-Loving Loser”, “Mainline Prosperity Blues” and “House Un-American Blues Activity Dream”, the blues roots remain, albeit filtered through an electric-folk sensibility, in the vein of Dylan's “Bringing It All Back Home”, an album released nine months earlier. Elsewhere, the magic of folk lies entirely in the interplay of instruments and voices: so while “Bold Marauder” is dominated by a dramatic feel and “Children Of Darkness” resembles a lullaby, both “A Swallow Song” and “Raven Girl” come alive within musical landscapes charged with mysterious desolation.
Besides the usual Bruce Langhorne and other session men, the album also featured the future producer of Cream, Felix Pappalardi, who plays electric bass on a couple of tracks.
“Bold Marauder” and “House Un-American Blues Activity”, along with the ballad “Birmingham Sunday” (a recollection of the massacre caused on September 15, 1963 by a Ku Klux Klan bomb at the Baptist Church in the Alabama town of the same name: twenty-two wounded and four girls killed, aged between eleven and fourteen), had already been made available a few months earlier on the compilation Singer Songwriter Project, mentioned above, which also featured songs by singer-songwriters Patrick Sky, Bruce Murdoch and David Blue.
If there's a way to say I'm sorry
Perhaps I'll stay another evening beside your door
And watch the moon rise inside your window
Where jewels are falling, and flowers weeping, and strangers laughing
Because you’re grieving that I have gone
(“Reflections In A Crystal Wind”)
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Just when everything seemed to be going well, the Fariñas' adventure was forced to reckon with the whims of fate. On April 30, 1966, the two were in high spirits, since Richard's first novel had just been published and Mimi was turning twenty-one. At one o'clock that day, there was a scheduled presentation of "Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me" at the Thunderbird, a bookstore in Carmel Valley, the area where the couple had settled since returning from Europe. Richard was brilliant and affable: he signed numerous copies of his book (the dedication of which was entirely for his wife: “This is for Mimi”) and chatted non-stop with friends and the other people who had come to hear him talk about his novel.
That afternoon, he also wanted to celebrate his wife's birthday with a surprise party organized together with Pauline, Mimi's other sister. Shortly before evening fell, Richard went for a ride on the Harley Davidson Sportster belonging to Willie Hinds, one of the party guests. The two of them sped along the roads of Carmel Valley. It was Richard's last ride: he was thrown from the bike near a curve, at the end of which it crashed into a wooden fence. With Richard Fariña's death, American folk revival lost one of its most eccentric and fascinating figures.
Lost and grief-stricken, Mimi decided to move to San Francisco, where for a while she lent her voice to the rock band Only Alternative and His Other Possibilities, before joining the Committee, a satirical comedy troupe. In 1967, arrested alongside her sister Joan during a peace demonstration, she also experienced jail time. A year later, she tried, without much conviction, to launch a solo career, immediately recording a couple of her late husband's songs, “Quiet Joys Of Brotherhood” and “Morgan The Pirate”, which ended up on Memories (1968; 12 tracks, 45:07), an album that also gathered live recordings, singles and outtakes from the duo's career. On the cover, the beautiful Mimi is captured in a shot showing her standing in a field with a flower in her hand. She looks into the camera and tries to smile, but all her sadness is plain to see.
Built on the orchestral arrangements of Peter Schickele (who had already worked with her sister Joan), “Quiet Joys Of Brotherhood” opens the record with its arcane, Irish-tinged atmosphere (Richard had in fact written it by borrowing the melody of “My Lagan Love”, a traditional song from Northern Ireland): think of a slightly sunnier version of Nico's "The Marble Index" and you're on the right track. Released as the B-side of the single “Pack Up Your Sorrows”, “Joy 'Round My Brain” shifts the music's center of gravity toward driving folk-rock cadences, pierced by John Hammond's crackling harmonica.
Next come the work song “Lemonade Lady” (which Richard had first recorded, though never released, back when he was collaborating with Eric Von Schmidt), the instrumental “Downtown” (which brings to mind a variation on “Tuileries”), the sea shanty “Blood Red Roses”, the bittersweet “All The World Has Gone By” (with sister Joan on vocals), an “Almond Joy” that skips along without overdoing it, and slightly different versions of “House Un-American Blues Activity Dream”, “A Swallow Song” and “Pack Up Your Sorrows”, plus the medley “Dopico: Celebration For A Grey Day”, recorded live at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
The most rock-leaning track is “Morgan The Pirate”, which Richard apparently wrote in response to “Positively 4th Street”, Dylan's fierce invective aimed at several key figures of the Greenwich Village folk scene, including Fariña himself, who not long before had actually won praise from Mr. Zimmerman…
Well Ok buddy, have to thank you for the ride,
don’t know how I would have made it without you.
Had to push when you got busted,
had to help you get adjusted,
had to pick up pieces after you’d been through.
But you had to have assistance
in confirming your existence
and establishing resistance
to the one or two hard feelings
one or two hard feelings
one or two hard feelings left behind
(“Morgan The Pirate”)
After marrying actor Milan Melvin, Mimi kept performing around with her sister Joan and folk singer Tom Jans, and went on to record a duet with actress Katherine Ross (“If You Love”) for the soundtrack of the 1970 film “Fool”, directed by Tom Gries. A year later, having signed with A & M Records following a standout performance at the Big Sur Folk Festival and a run of shows opening first for Cat Stevens and then for James Taylor, Mimi and Tom Jans recorded Take Heart (10 tracks; 38:43), with Emil Richards and Jim Keltner on percussion, Sneeky Pete on pedal steel guitar and Craig Doerge on organ and piano.
The album is an honest slice of folk-country, torn between the bittersweet breeziness of “Carolina” and “Madman”, the laid-back sway of “Kings And Queens”, the delightfully gospel-tinged “Letter To Jesus”, and the sweet ballads “Charlotte”, “The Great White Horse” (a cover of the 1970 song of the same name by Buck Owens and Susan Raye), and finally “In The Quiet Morning (For Janis Joplin)”, which Mimi also passed on to her sister Joan, who was more than happy to include it on the tracklist of “Come From The Shadows”, her thirteenth album, released in 1972. Rounding out Take Heart is the instrumental guitar duet “After The Sugar Harvest”.
The album's disappointing sales led Mimi, who had by then divorced Melvin, to end her collaboration with Jans. Invited by her sister to perform alongside B.B. King for the inmates of Sing Sing, Mimi developed a deep concern for people in difficult circumstances, and in 1974 founded the non-profit organization Bread And Roses, aimed at "bringing live music and free entertainment to children, adults and the elderly isolated within institutional settings: nurseries and schools for children with special needs, hospitals, juvenile and adult detention facilities, homeless shelters, adult rehabilitation centers, and nursing and convalescent homes." The name Bread And Roses was suggested to Mimi after she read the 1912 poem of the same name by James Oppenheim, usually associated with the strike proclaimed in 1912 by textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Mimi wrote a brand new melody to set it to music, and over the years the result would be covered and admired by several singer-songwriters, including Judy Collins, Josh Lucker, Utah Phillips and Ani DiFranco.
As we go marching, marching in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people here are singing: “Bread and roses! Bread and roses!”
The effort Mimi poured into running Bread And Roses kept her away from the music world until 1985, the year Philo Records released Solo, which, besides a handful of covers (Tim Hardin's “How Can We Hang On To A Dream”, to name one) and a revival of “Quiet Joys Of Brotherhood”, gathered six songs written by her own hand, including the tender elegy “Best Of Friends” and the shadowy “Old Woman”, a “Big Party” that blends folk and jazz with valuable help from guitarist Lowell Levinger, formerly of the Youngbloods, the airy excursion into traditional Irish music “Mary Call”, and the mariachi-flavored, good-humored “Disappointed Again”. Weighed down by a few synth touches and a "rubbery" bass sound (it was, after all, the Eighties!), these tracks could only faintly recapture the glory days of the Fariña duo.
In the years that followed, Mimi continued devoting herself to running Bread And Roses, staying largely away from the music world, before passing away in July 2001 from complications of neuroendocrine cancer. Nearly thirty-five years had passed since that cursed late-April afternoon in 1966.
Now is the time for your loving, dear
And the time for your company
Now when the light of reason fails
And fires burn on the sea;
Now in this age of confusion
I have need for your company
For I am a wild and a lonely child
And the son of an angry man;
And now with the high wars raging
I would offer you my hand;
For we are the children of darkness
And the prey of a proud, proud land
It’s once I was free to go roaming in
The wind of a springtime mind;
And once the clouds I sailed upon
Were sweet as lilac wine;
So why are the breezes of summer, dear
Enlaced with a grim design?
And where was the will of my father when
He raised his sword on high?
And where was my mother’s wailing when
Our flags were justified?
And where will we take our pleasure when
Our bodies have been denied?
So now is the time for your loving, dear
And the time for your company
Now when the light of reason fails
And fires burn on the sea;
Now in this age of confusion
I have need for your company
(“Children Of Darkness”, 1965)
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Notes
* A fast, syncopated musical genre developed in the early Sixties by small ensembles known as charangas. (Wikipedia)
Bibliography
David Hajdu: Positively 4th Street. How Four Kids Changed Music. Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, Richard Fariña (Arcana, 2004)
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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.
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