The Connie Converse Centennial (Music, Manifestations, and Unsolved Mystery)

Today marks the 100th birthday of the elusive creature Connie Converse (Elizabeth Converse, b. 1924) and this year also marks many other round anniversaries connected with the woman besides. In 1954 (70 years ago) she performed at a salon organized by cartoonist and animator Gene Deitch of Terrytoons (and director of Jules Feiffer’sMunro), who recorded her and was a kind of keeper of her tiny flame thereafter. 1954 was also the year she was on The Morning Show with Walter Cronkite, her only widely heard public performance. August 1974 (50 years ago, a few days after her 50th birthday) was when she disappeared off the face of the earth, never to be seen or heard from again. And 2004 was when Dietch played some of her tracks on WNYC radio, sparking renewed interest in her music.

Originally from Concord, New Hampshire, Converse was the daughter of a strict Baptist minister. She was her class valedictorian, and won an academic scholarship to Mount Holyoke, where she studied for two years. She then moved to to Greenwich Village, where she was drawn into the bohemian life, working at a printshop, and taking up folk music, accompanying her own original songs on guitar.

This is when she became “Connie” Converse, a good show biz name, redolent of both Nashville and the Brill Building. But the point of her was, she wasn’t all slick and polished. She was no beauty queen. If you look at the timeline, she came along before the big commercial career breakthoughs of Dylan and Peter, Paul, and Mary and company. She’d have had to do some heavy lifting to be heard by the suits anyway. But even so, even if she had hung on a few years more, one thinks it unlikely that most of her contemporaries could have heard what we can hear, we of the post-punk, antifolk era. Her most obvious strong suit was her lyrics, which (like Dylan) she typed on a typewriter, and which demonstrated both innate gifts and her Mt. Holyoke education. Her singing is sweet but a little rough, much like the Appalachian grannies you hear in those genuine folk recordings collected by the Lomaxes. Her tunes and chords seem complex to my semi-educated ear, and there are photos of her writing down music on staves. She knew what she was about. A conceptual lovechild of Daniel Johnston and Joni Mitchell? And Emily Dickinson? Something very novel like that, which is why people got so excited when her music surfaced in recent years. She was ahead of her time, to put it mildly.

Her period of immersion in the New York folk scene lasted until 1961. By then her champion Dietch had moved to Prague, and she grew tired of trying to make it in NYC. She moved to Ann Arbor, then a center of progressive political ferment. Her brother was a poli-sci prof at U. of M., and became the conduit through which she became an editor at the peacenik Journal of Conflict Resolution in 1963, where she remained for about a decade. (Previously she had written for the academic periodical Far Eastern Survey). Her writings on such topics as racism, war, and colonialism seem as significant in their way as her music.

Then she hit the half century mark and depression set in. Her magazine moved to the East Coast, and she learned she needed a hysterectomy. She began drinking more. Friends and family arranged for her to take trips to England and Alaska as a diversion but it didn’t work. Shortly after her 50th birthday, she composed a carefully worded goodbye note, packed her stuff in her VW bug and hit the road. Like some legend in a folk song, no one ever saw her again. People have tried to solve it, but there’s not much to go on.

In 2009, several of her recordings were gathered and released as the album How Sad, How Lovely. Other musicians have also recorded her compositions, on the records Connie’s Piano Songs (2014), and Vanity of Vanities: A Tribute to Connie Converse (2017). Early this year, singer-songwriter Hope Levy presented a piece called The Connie Converse Universeat the San Diego International Fringe Festival.

I was drawn to this story by my old friend Howard Fishman, himself one of the great folksingers of our time, who came out with a biography about her a few months back. Its title, To Anyone Who Ever Asks, references the opening lines from her goodbye note. Get Howard’s book here.