100 years after she was born, 50 years since she disappeared without trace (10th Aug, 1974), I am celebrating The Guitar Songs of Connie Converse. Written between 1950 and 1955, in New York, and unheard until 2009, I first heard them three months ago and have been playing them since, finding new qualities with each listen.

Her first song (she dated them) has three strangers, ‘one wearing green, one a peacock feather/ and one wearing overshoes against the wintry weather’, leading her down the exhilarating road into song writing. In eighteen songs, of adventurous lyrics, sophisticated music and neat guitar accompaniments, she explores a quirky and picaresque world. But also her own abiding and existential loneliness. 

There are lovers lost, lovers she waits for in vain, and lovers who disappoint.
And the exemplary man, ‘who wore his heart unfurled’, and dies young.
She gives us, with a Dorothy Parker edge, in ‘Roving Woman’ the cautionary and yet defiant tale of a woman alone in 1950s New York who has the temerity to play cards and drink in bars.
There is a Meliès-like adventure among the stars, as she pursues Orion, only to find him as disappointing as the men.
And the two-reel silent-film-like tale of the man who goes into a bar seeking only to quench his thirst, and ends up being hanged and still thirsty.
In a touching song of a city sunset, ‘The day gathering into/ A single light/ And the shadows rising up/ From the brim of the night,’ the lovers await the first star. While for her, ‘Too few, too few/ Are the days that will hold/ Your face, your face/ In a blaze of gold …’
Neatly-made lines like, ‘honey bee/ Go tell a starling/ To go tell my darling/ To hurry home to me.’
The man she’s better off without, in her defiant aloneness, as where she lives now, between two mountains, ‘Up that tree/ There’s sort of a squirrel thing/ Sounds just like we did/ When we were quarrelling …’

And, one of her last songs, the haunting ‘One by One’. Here it is, complete.

‘We go walking in the dark 
We go walking in the dark
And it’s not as lovers go
Two by two
To and fro
But it’s one by one
One by one in the dark.

We go walking out at night
As we wander through the grass
We can hear each other pass
But we’re far apart
In the dark.

We go walking in the night
With the grass so dark and tall
We are lost past recall
If the moon is down –
And the moon is down.

We are walking in the dark
 If I had your hand in mine
I could shine
I could shine

Like the morning sun.
Like the sun.’

All this in a crystalline voice that is both strong and vulnerable, and with her sophisticated and discrete guitar accompaniment

Converse never performed in public, except to gatherings of people she knew. Where would she have performed? Unsuitable alike for concert hall and cocktail lounge, and before coffee houses were on the scene. I imagine her sitting with guitar, by the stage in an off-Broadway play about the life portrayed in the songs, singing her songs as the Chorus to the play. (One of her later song-cycles was Cassandra …) She seems to have made only diffident attempts to have them published – ‘no market’ was the response. And perhaps writing them was all.
Certainly she thought enough of them to record them on her expensive reel-to-reel tape recorder. Also to allow an acquaintance, Gene Deitch, to record her at evening gatherings, which she sounds as if she’s enjoying.

Converse, sometimes Elizabeth, sometimes Connie, moved on. To more elaborate, composed music, then out of New York to Ann Arbor, where as editor and writer of The Journal of Conflict Resolution, she made important contributions to Peace Research.

However by 1973 her drinking, smoking and deep inner sadness were sinking her into depression. A stay in England, financed by her friends, changed nothing. (Although she did say it was the only time she ever had “fun”.)

In August 1974, soon after her 50th birthday, she organised her affairs into a filing cabinet, wrote notes to friends that would arrive after she had gone, and left this message, ‘Human society fascinates me and awes me and fills me with grief and joy; I just can’t find my way to plug into it. … I am in everyone’s debt. Elizabeth Connie Converse.’
She packed everything into her VW Beetle, drove away, and was never seen or heard from again.

Which might have been it, for her songs, another ‘never was’, in a world of ‘might have beens.’

Except:
– In 2004 80-year-old Gene Deitch, visiting from Prague to promote a comic book he had co-authored, played, on a New York radio show, amid much unmemorable music he had recorded, ‘One by One’.
– Which college student Dan Dzula heard, noted, and on graduating formed a record company to release, in 2009, Deitch’s recordings of Converse as How Sad, How Lovely.
– Which, in 2010, New Yorker writer and musician Howard Fishman heard and, captivated by, began the exhaustive research which resulted in
– The 2023 publication of To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, The Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse, a superbly comprehensive and well-written 560 page biography, which I have both enjoyed and made much use of. Thank you.
– In 2023, Musicks, Converse’s home recordings of her songs, stored in the filing cabinet, were released.

In April 6 2024, in On My Radar in The Observer, Vashti Bunyan chose as her song ‘Roving Woman’. For some reason I did what I rarely do – followed up the choice. Which took me to How Sad, How Lovely, and then to Fishman’s biography.

Connie Converse’s songs are on Youtube. Listen there, then download the album from Bandcamp, and play and play. (I play them in the order they were composed, as noted by Converse, and listed in Fishman’s book, but that’s my chronology thing.)

On 10 Aug I will remember and celebrate, Connie Converse.

And hope that the play of her life, accompanied by her songs, which I imagined in an off-Broadway production, might yet be written and performed, a play for today.

Enjoy.

References:
Connie Converse, How Sad, How Lovely, 2009, Bandcamp.
Connie Converse, Musicks, 2023, Bandcamp.
Howard Fishman, To Anyone Who Ever Asks: the Life, Music and Mystery of Connie Converse, 2023, Wildfire.