A SURPRISINGLY GOOD LITTLE tv documentary on the murder of ...

Farina was a rising "folk" music star and had just published his first novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, when he died in a motorcycle accident in 1966. He had gone to college with Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow is dedicated to Farina), and Been Down? had much of the over-the-edge wackiness of, say, V., though not its depth?which might have come in Farina's later work, because it's there in his music.

Richard sang and recorded with his wife Mimi, Joan Baez's sister. Altogether, he was at the center of an artistic circle of the mid-60s that included Bob Dylan, and the loss of him was huge, especially to music, though he wanted most to succeed as a writer. His songs ran from deeply dark to skewedly funny, covering love, societal mores and, maybe most effectively, political and social polemic.

The Farinas punched the status quo mockingly between the eyes ("House Un-American Blues Activity Dream"), produced a fierce, beautiful and unrelenting vision of war ("Children of Darkness") and sang of convoluted emotion worthy of Emily Bronte ("Reflections in a Crystal Wind"). The songs bore Richard's unmistakable personal vocabulary, underlined by a unique touch on the dulcimer and autoharp.

Their instrumentals, in which Mimi seems to have had the strongest hand, romp and scoot and soar. "Tommy Makem Fantasy" pulls together a medley of Clancy Brothers songs like "Little Beggar Man." "Celebration for a Grey Day" touches down in both the highlands and lowlands of folk country.

I find that my favorite from their best of collection changes with my mood. "Children of Darkness" grabs me when I've stumbled over the news; "Sell-out Agitation Waltz" plays snickering games with the establishment ("They're liable to hunt you down and dress you in a wedding gown and offer substantial careers"); "Hard-Loving Loser," about a perpetual failure who beds most of the U.S. female population, counteracts the everyday blues ("He's the kind of soldier got no sense of direction/And they send him in the jungle alone").

But "Michael, Andrew and James"? It's one of the most disturbing, almost terrifying songs I've ever listened to, not so much for the fact of the Klan killings in Mississippi, but for Farina's choice of a sexual metaphor set inside a Lovecraftian dirge. It's as much a black mass as a song, a counter-ritual to the murders that's as mysterious and brutal as the killings themselves.

He piles up images of mold and decay (the three bodies were uncovered from an earthen dam), interlaced with enumerations of loss ("five, the senses never more"). But the recurring sexual imagery is the most unsettling: "Chill was his groin against the clay/Never more to feel the day? But once his manhood riding tall?" It's as though he saw the attempts to bring civil rights to the backwoods not just as a political journey, but as a form of sexual escapade. Was this intended to reflect the Klansmen's view? An analogy of the workers' daring in a hostile land? Whatever else, it's fiercely compelling.

Much about Farina himself made little coherent sense. David Hajdu's Positively 4th Street, covering the Dylan/Baez, etc., circle (in most unflattering terms?Hajdu doesn't even seem to like their music, and you have to wonder why he chose this subject for a book), shows Farina constantly erecting elaborate, contradictory fantasies around his personal life. Maybe he saw Michael, Andrew and James as similar fantastic constructs. Or maybe there's something really simple here that I'm missing.

What's Out There: "Best of" and (relatively) "Complete" Vanguard sets. And thanks to one of our fans (the other was asleep) who put me onto musicstack.com, where you can also get the Horsies and oodles of Dory Previn.