Richard Fariņa

As a musician, Richard Farina will always be primarily known for the recordings he did in the mid-'60s as half of Richard & Mimi Farina. He did, however, make a few very obscure solo recordings in the mid-'60s, as well as doing an earlier duo album with fellow folksinger Eric Von Schmidt. For that reason he merits an entry of his own, although readers seeking information about his musical and personal partnership with Mimi Farina should also look under Richard & Mimi Farina. Farina, in fact, is much more well known now as a novelist and poet than he is as a musician. Born in 1937 to a Cuban father and Irish mother, he spent various parts of his youth in Brooklyn, Cuba, and Ireland. His life prior to the 1960s is still the matter of some mystery, but it's believed that he spent time in Ireland in the 1950s working with the Irish Republican Army and also time in Cuba as that country was undergoing revolution. He attended Cornell University in the late '50s where his experiences would form a foundation for his novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like up to Me, and where he became friends with future major American author Thomas Pynchon. In 1960 he was working in New York as an advertising copywriter, a job that ended upon his marriage to noted folk singer Carolyn Hester. Farina was already a writer of short stories and poetry, which he would have published in numerous magazines over the next half-dozen years. However, he became interested in performing music as well after marrying Hester who helped teach him to play dulcimer. The couple lived in England for a while in the early '60s, sometimes playing together before their marriage dissolved. Through Hester, however, Farina had already met Bob Dylan (who got signed to Columbia partly as a result of his appearance as a...