Mimi Baez Fariña (born Margarita Mimi Baez, April 30, 1945 – July 18, 2001) was a singer-songwriter and activist, the youngest of three daughters to a Scottish mother and a Mexican-American physicist, Albert Baez. She was the younger sister of the singer and activist Joan Baez.

Career

Early years

Fariña's father, a physicist affiliated with Stanford University and MIT, moved his family frequently, due to his job assignments, working in places not just in the United States, but internationally. She benefited from dance and music lessons, and took up the guitar, joining the 1960s American folk music revival.

Fariña met novelist, musician, and composer Richard Fariña in 1963 when she was 17 years old and married him at 18 in Paris. The two collaborated on a number of influential folk albums, most notably, Celebrations for a Grey Day (1965) and Reflections in a Crystal Wind (1966), both on Vanguard Records. After Richard Fariña's 1966 death (on Mimi's twenty-first birthday) in a motorcycle accident, Mimi moved to San Francisco where she flourished as a singer, songwriter, model, actress, and activist. She performed at various festivals and clubs throughout the Bay Area including the Big Sur Folk Festivals, the Matrix, and the hungry i. Mimi briefly sang for the rock group the Only Alternative and His Other Possibilities. In 1967, Fariña joined a satiric comedy troupe called The Committee. That same year, she and her sister Joan Baez were arrested at a peaceful demonstration, where the two were temporarily housed in Santa Rita Jail, personalizing the experience of captivity for her. In 1968 Mimi married Milan Melvin and continued to perform, sometimes recording and touring with either her sister Joan or the folksinger Tom Jans, with whom she recorded an album in 1971, entitled Take Heart.