Thursday, February 13, 2014

Mimi and Farina sing Pack up Your Sorrows

Cover image from Ace Records

Mimi Baez, younger sister of Joan Baez, was also a singer. In 1963, aged eighteen, she married Richard Farina. With Richard's dulcimer, they produced a unique sound.

As well as Pack up Your Sorrows, this talented duo sang Richard's composition about the racial killings in Alabama, Birmingham Sunday, later sung by many others.

They also sang Pete Seeger's House of Un American Activities Blues Activity Dream, which pillories McCarthyism.

Richard Farina was born in Brooklyn and died tragically before his 30th birthday in a motorcycle accident in 1966. By then he had also published a novel, Been Down so Long it Looks Like up to me.

Beginning in 1974, Mimi Farina worked with prisoners and other shut-ins, bringing free live music into institutions through a charity called Bread and Roses. Mimi died of cancer in Mill Valley, California in 2001. She was only 56.

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