Born in Laconia and raised in Concord, Connie Converse was an accomplished songwriter, composer, political activist and scholar in the mid-1900s. But she didn’t get much mainstream attention during her lifetime. In 1974, Converse chose to drive away and disappear.
In a new book, “To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse,” author Howard Fishman traces Converse’s musical and personal footprint. NHPR’s Morning Edition host Rick Ganley spoke with Fishman about why he was drawn to the reclusive musician’s work.
Transcript
Howard Fishman: As a musician myself, who has worked for many years outside the mainstream. I was fascinated by the fact that Converse's music sort of represents the best possible version of everything I've ever tried to do in music. I mean, she's way better than anything I've ever done, and I thought, ”Look what happened to her. How was it possible that music this good could have been ignored for so long?” So it became my mission to gain some recognition for her, belated though it might be, for this incredible work that she did in the 1950s.
Rick Ganley: Now, she didn't have an opportunity to even release her music as an official album. The remaining recordings that we have of Converse's music are all from informal gatherings with friends and tapes that she made of herself. What were some of the obstacles that she faced that prevented her music from reaching an audience when she was alive?
Howard Fishman: I think she had two primary obstacles. One is that she was a woman working within the confines of a male-dominated music industry that basically wanted women to be either virgins or vixens, and she was neither of those. So that was problem number one. Problem number two is, she was pioneering as an artist. The music she was making didn't yet have a context, so there was no way to market her or promote her because what she was doing was very new.
Rick Ganley: And a lot of what she was doing was, I guess we would think of it nowadays as kind of that singer-songwriter variety of genre, if you had to put a label on it. But she was years ahead of that. She was years ahead of Dylan and the folk movement coming out of Boston and New York, wasn't she?
Howard Fishman: Yeah, she preempted Dylan and company by a good dozen years or so. The lyrics are autobiographical, they're clearly about the singer. There's a sense of intimacy between the singer and the audience. There's a vulnerability that's going on. There's a literary quality to the music.
Rick Ganley: Can you tell us a bit more about her upbringing in New Hampshire? I know she was born in Laconia, raised in Concord. In your book, you describe Converse's family as having very deep Yankee roots and sensibilities.
Howard Fishman: That's correct. Both sides of her family go way back in New England, arriving around 1630. Her family was quite strict, from my understanding. Puritanical. No dancing was allowed in the house. No music that wasn't religious [or classical] was allowed in the house. And my sense is that Converse bristled under that sort of upbringing, that she couldn't wait to get out and spread her wings. And that's exactly what she did once she left New Hampshire.
Rick Ganley: It sounds like a typical “I want to get out of this small town as fast as possible” story, doesn't it?
Howard Fishman: I think that's true. And I think that Converse's history in New Hampshire is one that's riddled with secrets and intrigue and a sense of almost gothic drama. There's one song, for example, called “Roving Woman,” where she writes about the pleasures of gambling and drinking and sleeping around, none of which would have made her New Hampshire parents very happy to hear about.
I think that in this song “Roving Woman,” she's talking about people gossiping. And I think that Connie Converse was privy to an awful lot of family gossip when she was growing up. And some of it involved people that were close relations of hers, including her cousin Edie, who grew up thinking that her mother was her sister. One of Converse's cousins joked with me at one point, he said something like, ”Well, are you tired of the Converse family yet? I think that we must be something out of Hawthorne, or maybe The National Enquirer.”
Rick Ganley: Obviously, she lived in a few different places, in New York and Ann Arbor, and she was a somewhat different person in those places, wasn't she?
Howard Fishman: She was a different person in all the places she lived. When she was in Concord, she was thought of as a wallflower. When she was in New York, she becomes interested in songwriting and moves to Greenwich Village and assumes a new identity as a bohemian — going out at night, playing songs at house parties and informal salons. Finally, when she moves to Ann Arbor, she leaves music behind completely, [and] becomes a scholar. And that period lasts until 1974, when she disappears for good.
Rick Ganley: And when she did disappear, she had been struggling with her mental health for years and facing a lack of direction in her career. She wrote letters to friends and family explaining her decision to abruptly leave the life that she was leading. And she also left a letter in her personal files directed to "anyone who ever asks." Can you tell us more about that?
Howard Fishman: It's my feeling that when Connie Converse left, it was because she realized that she had spent her life basically as a ghost, as an invisible person. [There were] all of the incredible activities and things that she produced in her life that were so fascinating, so beyond their time. But people couldn't see her and they couldn't see those things. And I think that by 1974, she essentially threw up her hands and said, ”OK, if the world can't see me, then I'm really going to just do what the world seems to want me to do, which is disappear. I'm going to eject myself from society completely.” And who knows what happened to her after that? She may be still alive. She'd be 98 today.
Rick Ganley: I find it fascinating that she kept files, and she kept very carefully curated files of her work.
Howard Fishman: She did. I think that Connie Converse had a sense that she had lived a life of significance, that she had made important contributions, that she had done things that were worthwhile. And it was simply that the world hadn't seen them. So she left it all behind in her filing cabinet with a nine page table of contents of where everything was, all of her letters and her diaries and her writings, her photographs, her artwork, her poetry. I think she could have left that filing cabinet out on the curb and really erased her existence entirely. But she didn't do that. And I think the reason she didn't do it is because she knew that one day her contributions would be recognized for what they are.
