Whatever Happened To... Connie Converse?

This is nothing rhetorical or a pun, but a genuine question.

Connie Converse was born, had a brief career on the music scene in New York City, moved, did lots of work around human rights publications, and then one day upped sticks, left her house and was literally never seen again. No further positive identification, no body, no trace of her car even. Nothing. She would have been 100 last year, but has not been seen for half of those years - and who knows, maybe she did live to see that day.....

She was born Elizabeth Converse on 3 August 1924, in New Hampshire. The middle child in a very strict Baptist household, her father the minister, and her mother noted as being 'musical'. There was one older brother, Paul, and one younger one, Philip.

She was clearly a bright student, becoming a valedictorian at Concord High School, before gaining an academic scholarship to Holyoke College in Massachusetts. She managed two years before dropping out and moving to New York City.

In the 1950s, she got a job working at the Academy Photo Offset printers and soon started referring to herself as Connie, as it was a nickname she had been given after arriving in the city. At some stage in that era, she began to write and play her own songs - her somewhat bohemian lifestyle of music, smoking and drinking, probably didn't sit well with the strict upbringing of her parents.

Trouble (audio only)

Nonetheless, she was playing music salons and friends houses, and she was encouraged in 1954 to play at a salon event hosted by the artist Gene Deitch, who recorded the show and became a fan. It was he who managed to get her first (and as far as we know only) public appearance, when she got a guest spot on CBS's The Morning Show, hosted by Walter Cronkite.

Connie and Philip

A few years later she recorded an album of music for her brother Philip, which she called Musicks (Volumes I & II). Her music was introspective and personal, as the 50s progressed, she switched from guitar towards using more piano. But by the early 60s, she was frustrated at her inability to get a proper foothold and sell her music in New York. So, in 1961, she upped and moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Philip was a professor of political science at the University of Michigan. She took a secretarial job, before becoming a writer and then managing the Journal of Conflict Resolution.

Father Neptune (audio only)

It seems that the music phase of her life was done. She was moving into the civil rights movement. As well as the work on the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Converse also worked with the Institute of Pacific Relations, on their Pacific Affairs journal. The editor of that, Owen Lattimore, had come under scrutiny by the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee, with the odious Joseph McCarthy calling him, "the top Soviet agent in North America." Her biographer, Howard Fishman gives this quote by her from the time - one that you may be forgiven for thinking was written this year, and not six decades or more ago:

"We have become a nation of awful paradox: hysteria inlaid with unconcern, literacy woven with misconception, democracy wrapped up in tyranny, boldness nailed down by fear. I have no doubt of the outcome, but I dread the interval."

Around 1969, she wrote a memo called, An Experiment Towards 'Ideological' Consultation, as part of the People Against Racism group. She broke her concept down into parts A to E, outlining her goals and strategies and defining her idea of FEDD; "I am coming to realize that the essence of racism is a 'frozen' pattern of exploitative domination / dependence between persons and between groups."

To Anyone Who Ever Asks

In 1972, the organisation behind the Journal of Conflict Resolution moved from Michigan to Yale. Converse was feeling burned out and depressed. In 1973, friends and colleagues clubbed together so that she could take a six month trip to England, with the hope that this would bring her out of her funk. It didn't.

She reluctantly agreed to go on a trip to Alaska with her mother, something she did not want to do. Also, around this time she found out that she was going to need to have a hysterectomy, which was obviously more devastating news.

In August 1974, just after her fiftieth birthday, she was expected at a family gathering. Instead, she wrote a number of letters to family and friends, but before they had even been delivered, Converse had packed up her little VW Beetle and headed off....

One of the letters was later found in her Ann Arbor filing cabinet and used by Fishman in the biography he wrote. It said:

"To Anyone Who Ever Asks:

This is the thin hard sublayer under all the parting messages I'm likely to have sent: let me go, let me be if I can, let me not be if I can't...

... In the months after I first got back from my desperate flight to England I began to realize that my new personal incapabilities were still stubbornly hanging in. I did fight; but they hung in...

... Human society fascinates me and awes me and fills me with grief and hoy; I just can't find my place to plug into it...

... So let me go, please; and please accept my thanks for those happy times... I am in everyone's debt."

She left a cheque and instruction for Philip to continue paying her health insurance each month for a certain length of time, and then stop that on a certain date. It had been thought she would head back to New York City, although no trace was ever found there. Someone once said they had seen an Elizabeth Converse in a phone directory in Kansas or Oklahoma, but couldn't be sure exactly. Around a decade later, the family considered using a private investigator, but were told that even if she was found, if she didn't want to be discovered, there was little they could do.

And that is pretty much that....

Photo: The Musick Group

Musical Re-birth:

Except, it never did properly end. While she was physically never found, many decades on, her music finally got the discovery it deserved.

One by One (audio only)

In 2004, the New York music historian David Garland, invited the now eighty year old Gene Deitch, who was now living in Prague, to come on his Spinning On Air radio show on WYNC. Deitch brought along those old 1950s reel-to-reel recordings he had of Converse and played them on air.

Subsequent to that, the Deitch recordings, along with some stuff she had done for Philip that were found in Ann Arbor, were pulled together and released. How Sad, How Lovely, came out in 2004 on Lau Derette Recordings (and in 2015 on vinyl, on Squirrel Things Recordings).

L.A. Times writer Randall Roberts reviewed the vinyl release, saying "few reissues of the past decade have struck me with more continued, joyous affection." Robert Forster, noted songwriter himself with the Go-Betweens, said that the record was "making a deep and marvellous connection between lyric and song that allows us to enter the world of an extraordinary woman living in mid-twentieth century New York."

The Original Singer-Songwriter?

There are some that make the argument that Converse was indeed the first person you could truly label as a singer-songwriter. She has been referred to as something of a precursor to Bob Dylan - and interestingly, as she was leaving New York City in 1961, Dylan arrived there that same year.

David Garland puts the case: "Converse wrote and sang back in the 1950s, long before singer-songwriter was a recognized category of style. But everything we value in singer-songwriters today - personal perspective, insight, originality, empathy, intelligence, wry humor - was abundant in her music."

Talkin' Like You (cover by Nickel Creek's Chris Thile and folk singer Madison Cunningham, 2019)

Her biographer, Howard Fishman, recalled to NPR in 2023, the first time he heard one of her songs play. "When I first heard it, I had the feeling that I had heard the song all my life and also that I had never heard it before. And the combination of those two things gave me goosebumps and started me down the rabbit hole..."

He added that, "In a way, she's a ghost. It's like her entire life was spent as an invisible woman who was able to see the future by giving use these gifts and thinking and writing and composing in ways that are so common to us today, but were not common at all in the 1950s."

Roving Woman (audio only)

British folk singer Vashti Bunyan, also discovered her more recently, telling the BBC in 2024 that, "She was completely ahead of her time and it must have been very hard for her. She must have felt isolated... If she had any ambition for her songs, she must have known how good they were, how clever and funny and wonderful they were, and poetic. But other people didn't seem to recognise that kind of genius writing at the time."

So, the mystery of her final days may never be uncovered, but at least, even if it has been far too belatedly, her music has been given the airing and respect that it deserved.