Mimi Fariña

Mimi Fariña, younger sister to Joan Baez, began her professional performing life in tandem with novelist and songwriter Richard Fariña, the man she married in 1963. Providing harmony vocals, the pair issued two standout Vanguard albums, Celebrations for a Grey Day in 1965 and Reflections in a Crystal Wind in 1966, before Richard died in a motorcycle accident that left Mimi, then 21, widowed. She next brought out Memories, an album drawn from the duo’s remaining studio recordings; the original pair of LPs later resurfaced as a two-fer best-of collection.

Settled in California during the late 1960s, Fariña joined a satiric improvisational theater ensemble and started writing her own material. She returned to record stores in 1971 with Take Heart, a duo project alongside Tom Jans that featured her tribute to Janis Joplin, “In the Quiet Morning,” a song her sister also recorded along with several other Fariña compositions.

During the 1970s she created Bread & Roses, a nonprofit that arranges live musical events inside hospitals and prisons. A number of the organization’s annual benefit concerts, which have showcased leading artists from folk and popular music, have been captured and commercially released. In 1985 Fariña issued her first solo album, aptly titled Solo, and supported it with a national tour. Through the late 1980s and 1990s she concentrated once more on Bread & Roses, guiding its development until lung cancer struck. On July 18, 2001, she died at her Mill Valley home, encircled by family and friends.