Mimi Farina

Mimi Fariña, the younger sister of Joan Baez, launched her professional performing career in tandem with her husband, the novelist and songwriter Richard Fariña, whom she married in 1963. The pair, who sang in harmony, 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 year, when Mimi was 21.

She later compiled the duo’s remaining recordings into the album Memories, while the pair of LPs from Richard’s lifetime appeared again as a combined best-of set. Settled in California during the late 1960s, Fariña joined a satiric improvisational theater ensemble and began writing her own songs. Her next recording project arrived in 1971 with the duo album Take Heart, recorded with Tom Jans and featuring her tribute to Janis Joplin, “In the Quiet Morning,” a song her sister also recorded.

In the 1970s she established Bread & Roses, a nonprofit that arranges live music in hospitals and prisons; several of its annual benefit concerts, which have presented major figures in folk and popular music, were later documented on record. Fariña released her first solo album, Solo, in 1985 and supported it with a national tour. Through the late 1980s and 1990s she concentrated again on Bread & Roses, guiding the organization until lung cancer developed. She died at her Mill Valley home on July 18, 2001, with family and friends at her side.