Considering Connie Converse by Olivia Ho

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.

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.

Art by Luisa Cichowski

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

verse had decided to leave New York. After moving to Ann Arbor, she took on a series of responsibilities, including activism work, several demanding academic jobs, and writing a novel—all of which eventually culminated in a major breakdown.

In August 1974, nearly a week after she turned 50, Converse packed up her car and drove away. Today, she would be nearing the end of a century of life.

Her songs are characterized by a sense of reserved yearning and melancholy tempered with a sharp wit. Her unique melodies provide a sense of folksy etherealness to her work—yet, as if to not allow her to float too high above the earth, her lyrics ground her.

In “Roving Woman,” for instance, Converse dancingly pokes fun of ’50s societal expectations—noting how, at the conclusion of her habitual saloon visits, “Someone always takes me home”—while also infusing the song with a self-deprecatory note (“Don’t see why they always do it / Can’t be vanity; must be sheer humanity”).

While Converse was never known to have any romantic relationships at all, the tragically romantic elements of her songs are incredibly present. In “One by One,” she sings of a longingly tense nighttime stroll. But, though she can make out the form of her lover in the dark,

“It’s not as lovers go / Two by two, to and fro / But it’s one by one / One by one in the dark.” In a wistful, lofty conclusion, she’s lost something she never had: “If I had your hand in mine / I could shine, I could shine.”

In this song, as in many songs, Converse is singing about a specific type of love, the type in which a bouquet of flowers picked at the park are pressed into her palm (“Playboy of the Western World”) and paying the doctor’s bills is celebrated with a waltz (“Empty Pocket Waltz”). Converse observes this love, or perhaps creates it, while always staying on the outside—painting a picture of a woman who was, it seems, very lonely, and who did not want to be lonely.

Every source I’ve read seems to conclude Converse’s story with a shrug, stating that she was “before her time.” There’s something logistically true about this. She wrote songs that are almost better contextualized in modern terms, and seems to always cast a somber wink towards her listener. She knows something, it seems, that the rest of us have yet to pick up on.

Yet picturing Converse as some tragic figure “before her time” almost gives credit for her genius to the modern age, as if everything would have ended differently had she been able to publish her home recordings on Bandcamp or gain a following on YouTube. But what makes Converse special and lasting is her universality. Regardless of when and in what context she was writing, her songs would always have had the same melancholic and wry resonance.

Perhaps Converse described the trajectory of her life best in “How Sad, How Lovely”: “Like life, like a smile / like the fall of a leaf / how sad, how lovely / how brief.” The real tragedy lies in the fact that she would never discover exactly how sad, lovely, and brief her body of work would come to be considered. ◆

Art by Luisa Cichowski