Richard Fariña

Um, Been Down So Long is a nice dramatic, you know, I...

To me, it was the evocation of, uh, Richard Farina's book, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me.

Yeah.

Which I haven't yet read, but I want to.

Podcast listeners may already be familiar with a couple of musicians that Pete has on in episode 16, as I've spoken about them a couple of different times on the podcast already.

These are Richard and Mimi Fariña.

Mimi Fariña was, of course, Joan Baez's sister, who had been married to Richard for a few years by this point, and the duo had become a well-known folk act in the world of music in the US by the mid-'60s.

The couple was bi-coastal, living near Monterey, California, but visiting New York City often, where they made their records.

Richard's background is rather unique, and is a story by itself, but in short, Fariña grew up in Brooklyn, having Cuban and Irish ancestry, and had many tall tales floating around about himself, likely to inflate his own personal mystery.

He had gone to Cornell with the now famous novelist Thomas Pynchon, and later dropped out of school to pursue his various artistic and musical interests in the US and in Europe.

One of his other interests was Mimi Baez, but that's a whole separate, irrelevant story for here.

What is notable here about Richard's display of his musicianship on Rainbow Quest is his playing the dulcimer in what was a new, innovative way for the time, diverging from the traditional mountain dulcimer style by using different tunings and strumming patterns.