A New England singer made sublime music. Then she vanished.
Some of her farewell notes indicated that she was headed back to New York, to make another fresh start. But other missives were more ominous. To her mother, still living in Concord, New Hampshire, where she was raised, she wrote: 'Take care of yourself, and get all the enjoyment you can out of life.' Another letter was even darker: 'Human society fascinates me and awes me and fills me with grief and joy; I just can't find my place to plug into it. So let me go, please.'
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Her car was never found; neither was her body. At the time of her departure, Converse was in rough shape: unemployed, in poor health, depressed, and a chain-smoking alcoholic. Though she'd dedicated her life to an astonishing range of artistic and intellectual pursuits (including visual art, poetry, prose, opera, and scholarly investigations into conflict resolution, institutional racism, statistics, and history), her accomplishments were virtually invisible in her time. As a woman toiling in worlds dominated by men, creating work far ahead of its time, she struggled to make herself known. 'I have dozens of fans, all over the world,' she would quip.
If only she'd known. Converse is now being embraced by generations of new fans who began discovering her music with the 2009 release of the album
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Converse was a Yankee, by birth if not by temperament. Though her ancestral family tree is deeply rooted in old New England soil (relatives on both sides of her family arrived in Boston in the 1630s), Converse spent her life rebelling against the stifling traditionalism of her forebears, rejecting the patriarchy and forging wild, new paths for herself. The recipient of a scholarship to attend Mount Holyoke College, she dropped out after two years and moved to New York City, where she found work in 1945 with a humanitarian think tank. When the House Un-American Activities Committee trained its lens on the organization for having possible Communist ties, she lost her job there, moved to Greenwich Village, and began writing and performing her own songs at a time when Bob Dylan was still a kid in Minnesota listening to Hank Williams in his childhood bedroom.
Recordings released after Connie Converse's disappearance.
The Musick Group, Heroic Cities LLC
Converse is also being celebrated today for the way she defiantly thumbed her nose at 1950s conventions. At a time when American women were expected to get married and have children, Converse sang songs about sexual liberation and the virtues of living alone. She ran with crowds that were bohemian, multiracial, and gay. In a diary entry responding to America's hard turn to the right in the McCarthy era, she wrote: 'If I ever cease to recall that my destiny is bound with a living cord to the destiny of the Jews, the Negroes, the anti-fascists, the expendables, I shall indeed be half dead.'
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By day, Converse worked a survival job. At night, she performed her songs in private homes, passing a hat to support her musical ambitions, which also included composing an opera and a formal song cycle based on Greek mythology's Cassandra, about another woman out of step with her time.
When Converse left New York in early 1961, just as
Stekert's intentions were good, but that moniker has stuck to Converse in ways that confuse and limit her legacy. Since his rise to prominence in the 1960s, Dylan's work has been the yardstick against which all 'singer-songwriters' are measured. But Converse was more than just an early example of that too-vague term. It's true that some of her songs were predictive of the formula that Dylan would ride to fame and fortune (original songs that mined the influences of traditional folk, blues, country, and gospel influences, while using the 'I' perspective, in introspective, witty, and literary ways), and in the way that she sang them (in an unpolished, often vulnerable voice). But much of her music could also be said to reside in the worlds of classical song, show tunes, jazz, and pop — a range of stylistic influences that she managed to synthesize into her own unique vernacular. Her music is as much like the Gershwins', Charles Ives's, and Stephen Sondheim's as it is like Bob Dylan's.
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And yet, even today, no one's music sounds quite like hers.
Connie Converse was never found, but her music — mostly unknown in its day — was. We have it now, and it represents a new reference point in the story of American music. Songs such as 'One By One,' 'Talkin' Like You,' 'Incommunicado,' and 'The Age of Noon' are not the quirky, half-baked musings of a minor also-ran: they are the brilliant, fully-realized vision of a sophisticated musical mind worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as any of our greats.
When Stekert compared her to Dylan, she was employing hyperbole to express the gobsmacked sense so many feel when we encounter her music for the first time. But Converse, the shy New England girl who left New Hampshire with no direction home, was not the female Bob Dylan. She was Connie Converse.
Listen to her album 'How Sad, How Lovely'
Howard Fishman is a musician, songwriter, and the author of
To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse.
Send comments to magazine@globe.com.
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