Relevant and accessible – “The Richard Fariña Dulcimer Book”
By Neal Hellman
The part of my life I miss the most is when I was fearless. Not necessarily intelligent or insightful, just fearless.
I was fearless and confident, which basically made me into a mountain dulcimer zealot. And as any inspired zealot, I had to keep creating. While driving a cab and living upstairs in my parent’s house in Brooklyn, I decided to write a book of arrangements based on my dulcimer hero, Richard Fariña, who was brought up less than a mile from my parent’s house.
He took the dulcimer out of the Appalachians and made it accessible to city kids like me. To anyone over 40 who plays the dulcimer, Richard Fariña has earned patriarchal status.
The publisher of my first book was not interested in my Fariña idea nor was any other music publisher in New York. Being the eager fan that I was, I decided to publish the book myself. In order to do so, I had to license the rights from Warner Bros. I can still remember the man at WB smirking the entire time we, or rather he, dictated the terms to me.
He asked me several times if I wanted to license someone like Joni Mitchell or Neil Young, as it would be the same price.
“No,” I would reply, “I’ll pay the 12.5% per book for the music of Richard Fariña, since I have a handle on the dulcimer world.”
“Suit yourself kid,” he replied, as I signed off on the deal and handed over $750 in advance.
I then borrowed $1,000 from my folks and threw in $2,000 from my cab-driving career. I had an artist friend (Jude Brae) from Vancouver do all the illustrations, which were based on Fariña’s liner notes from his recordings.
Sally and I took all the music and illustrations over to Faculty Press in Brooklyn, an old New York socialist printer who printed “Sing Out,” “The Pete Seeger Banjo Book,” and a number of other political journals. The staff appreciated the fact that we were putting out a book on Richard and Mimi’s music and treated us like kindred spirits. They never charged us for all the prepress work they did. I am sure it was due to the fact that so many of the songs in the book were political.
Shortly after moving to Santa Cruz, I made an appointment with Mimi Fariña to present her with a copy of the book. As she scanned through the work, she stopped on the page that had an illustration of a woman in a cabin in Big Sur cooking on an old wood stove. As this image was based on Richard’s liner notes, I realized it was her. Mimi stared at the picture for a minute, and I could tell she was moved by it. She thanked me for producing the book but told me it was really all his music.
“I was nineteen when we recorded these albums, it seems like a different life ago,” she said.
By 1997, I still had over 3,000 of my inspired creation living under my bed and in various closets around my home. Then a few small miracles happened.
First, after hearing a Richard and Mimi recording of “Reno Nevada,” Douglass Cooke (yet another Brooklyn native) created a Fariña web page (now defunct). Second, a book on Richard’s life, “Positively Fourth Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña” by David Hajdu, was published in 2001.
In December of 2009 I sold my last hard copy. But fear not – “The Richard Fariña Dulcimer Book” is currently available digitally at the same price it was in 1974. Visit bit.ly/richard495 to purchase.
Neal Hellman is a nationally acclaimed mountain dulcimer performer and teacher and the founder of the Gourd Music record label. He is the author of many books on the Appalachian dulcimer, including “The Dulcimer Chord Book” and “The Hal Leonard Dulcimer Method,” and has produced over forty albums. Find him at gourd.com.
