FARIA, RICHARD; AND FARIA, MIMI

born April 30, 1937?, New York, N.Y., U.S. died April 30, 1966, Carmel, Calif. born April 30, 1945, Stanford, Calif. Mimi Faria's original name Mimi Margharita Baez American husband-and-wife folksinging duo who were significant figures in the folk music revival of the 1960s. Richard, also a novelist, was killed in a motorcycle accident just after the publication of his first novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (1966; filmed 1971). Richard studied engineering and literature at Cornell University, served with the Irish Republican Army in the mid-1950s, and later served briefly with Fidel Castro's guerrillas in Cuba. Having met in Europe, he and Mimi (the younger sister of folksinger Joan Baez) were married in 1963. A multi-instrumentalist (guitar, dulcimer, and zither) and gifted songwriter, Richard had released an album on which Bob Dylan had performed under the pseudonym Blind Boy Grunt before he and Mimi (who primarily played guitar) began performing together. Their highly regarded albums Celebrations for a Grey Day (1965) and Reflections in a Crystal Wind (1966) were early examples of folk rock, and the duo's performance at the 1965 Newport (Rhode Island) Folk Festival seemed to promise great things to come. Partially set at Cornell, Richard's first novel, a comic work about the meaning of life, provides a portrait of the counterculture on the eve of the 1960s. His novel Long Time Coming and a Long Time Gone was published posthumously in 1969. Autobiographical and episodic, his fiction is humorous and irreverent, with a freewheeling quality reminiscent of the novels of the Beat writers of the 1950s. Following Richard's death, Mimi did improvisational acting before returning to recording and performing. She went on to found the Bread and Roses charity organization, which provides free live entertainment for people living in institutions.