Considering Connie Converse Olivia Ho
It’s difficult to place ’50s musician Connie Converse in time. The nostalgic lilt of her voice and the steady progression of her narratives identify her as a product of earlier years, yet her lyrics and strange metaphors place her more among modern singer-songwriters. This penetrating sense of untimeliness is present in her other writings. In a draft of a letter she would later send to her family before disappearing in 1974, Converse wrote: If I ever was a member of this species, perhaps it was a social accident that has now been canceled… To survive it all, I expect I must drift back down through the other half to the twentieth twentieth, which I already know pretty well, to the hundredth hundredth, which I only read and heard about. I might survive there quite a few years—who knows? But you understand I have to do it by myself, with no benign umbrella. 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.
Art by Luisa Cichowski
Converse’s story always seems to begin with her disappearance. Perhaps those attempting to describe her recognize that part of her appeal lies in her mystery: the temptingly brilliant image of her, newly fifty, driving her Volkswagen Beetle into the great unknown. In her wake she left behind nothing but a series of songs, cryptic letters, and a meticulously organized file cabinet. Her work has influenced artists like Greta Kline of Frankie Cosmos, who wrote in Under the Radar magazine that Converse’s lyrics are “like perfect poems,” after the release of the latter’s recordings in 2009 by Squirrel Thing Recordings. Before the release, her music and life story had remained largely undiscovered. Connie Converse was born on August 3rd, 1924, in New Hampshire to a strict Baptist father. The influence of her teetotaling upbringing made itself clear in her music, which often alludes to feminist themes. After her disappearance, Converse’s family speculated that she was a communist—which sounds both like something that could’ve been true, or possibly just the misinformed reaction to any political peculiarities of a woman in the 1950s. Her brother Philip, a notable political scientist, described her openly as a polymath and genius. After attending college at Mount Holyoke for two years, Converse dropped out and moved to New York, where she began to write songs in earnest. There, she met friend Gene Deitch, a music enthusiast who regularly recorded Converse’s performances for their friends. The height of her musical career was in 1954, when she performed on The Morning Show with Walter Cronkite. No recordings of the show exist—and though family and friends had regarded the opportunity as Converse’s NF009 | 3
