Martin Abend
From:
Berlin, Germany
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Posted 20 Jul 2001 2:15 am |
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Folksinger Mimi Farina -- Bread and Roses founder
Gift of live music for thousands of shut-ins
Joel Selvin, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, July 19, 2001
©2001 San Francisco Chronicle
URL: [url=http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2001/07/19/MNL97811.DTL&type=mu\]http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2001/07/19/MNL97811.DTL&type=mu\[/url]
sic
Mimi Farina, folksinger and founder of the Bread and Roses charitable
organization, died of cancer yesterday morning at her Mill Valley
home. She was 56. Her family, including sister Joan Baez, were at her
bedside.
"She finally won her battle with cancer," Baez said.
Ms. Farina found out she had lung cancer in December 1998. She
continued with plans for the gala 25th anniversary celebration for
Bread and Roses at San Francisco's War Memorial Opera House in March
2000, where she appeared wearing a turban to hide her hair loss from
chemotherapy treatments. She made jokes about not having bad hair
days any longer.
With her husband, Richard Farina, she recorded a pair of classic folk
albums in the mid-60s. Her husband, who wrote "Been Down So Long It
Looks Like Up to Me," died in a motorcycle crash on his way home from
his first book- signing in 1966. It was her 21st birthday
Her romance with Richard Farina was chronicled in the current
best-seller, "Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan
Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina, and Richard Farina" by author
David Hajdu.
Ms. Farina continued her career in music after her husband's death,
although it was as founder of the charitable organization Bread and
Roses that she found lasting rewards. The nonprofit organization in
Marin County presents live music performances to shut-ins at
hospitals, prisons and senior homes. Bread and Roses presented more
than 500 performances at 99 institutions last year with more than 600
volunteers and a staff of only nine.
Mimi Farina, the youngest of three daughters, was born while their
father studied for his doctorate at Stanford. She lived with her
family in Baghdad and Paris, where she met Richard Farina, a
half-Irish, half-Cuban beatnik. They married and moved to the Carmel
highlands and pursued a career as a folk- singing team. Richard and
Mimi Farina recorded two albums, "Reflections in a Crystal Wind" and
"Celebration for a Grey Day," and at least one of their songs, "Pack
Up Your Sorrows," was an airplay staple in the early days of
underground FM radio. His dulcimer still sits in his widow's home.
After her husband's death, she continued to play music, including a
brief fling with an acid-rock band, the Only Alternative and his
Other Possibilities.
She joined the popular San Francisco satirical theater troupe The
Committee the next year.
She married hippie radio entrepreneur Milan Melvin in 1968 in an
improvised outdoor ceremony at the Big Sur Folk Festival, a
counterculture social event prominent enough to have been chronicled
in the pages of early Rolling Stone. The marriage ended in divorce
two years later. She recorded an album with singer-songwriter Tom
Jans in 1971, the last album she released, but at that point Ms.
Farina was tiring of the music business merry-go-round.
"I suffered from comparing my voice to my sister's," Ms. Farina said
in February 1999. "In the end, it was a great relief to stop singing."
The idea for Bread and Roses came in 1974 when she and her sister
attended a moving show by bluesman B.B. King at New York's Sing Sing
prison in 1974. "It was phenomenal to watch the place go silent,
which doesn't happen that much in prison," she said.
But it was a performance she gave a few months later at a halfway
house for troubled teenagers arranged by a cousin that crystallized
the idea for Bread and Roses.
"It wasn't inspiring at the moment," she said. "It was hard to get
their attention, this roomful of unhappy teens. But I realized I
could imagine people who could be really good at this."
At first, Ms. Farina financed the organization with annual benefits
at the Greek Theater in Berkeley. These were all-acoustic concerts,
long before anyone called it "unplugged," that featured three days of
the greats and near- greats of folk, blues and rock -- Kris
Kristofferson, Ry Cooder, Jackson Browne, David Crosby and Graham
Nash, and, of course, her sister.
She shifted her fund-raising approach to corporate and private donors
after losses from the sixth annual event threatened to bankrupt the
organization. The 2000 Opera House gala was the cornerstone of a
campaign to raise $3 million to ensure the financial stability of the
organization.
Among the many name entertainers who have volunteered for Bread and
Roses are Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, Herbie Hancock, Huey Lewis, Neil
Young and Van Morrison. Bread and Roses brought jazz great Jon
Hendricks to sing at the Redwoods, a Mill Valley retirement home, and
presented Willie Nelson to Delancey Street residents. Michael
Feinstein once stayed at Laguna Honda hospital until he sang every
request. At the rate of about 10 per week, Bread and Roses produces
more shows than Bill Graham Presents.
There are now more than 15 other community organizations modeled
after Bread and Roses across the country.
Ms. Farina is survived by her mother and father, Albert and Joan
Baez, her two sisters, Joan Baez and Pauline Bryan. A memorial
service will be held at Grace Cathedral, but a date has not been set. |
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