CONNIE CONVERSE, (nee Elizabeth Easton Converse) born on this date (disappeared August 1974), was an American singer-songwriter and musician, active in New York City in the 1950s. Her work is among the earliest known recordings in the singer-songwriter genre of music.
Converse left her family home in 1974 in search of a new life and was not heard from again. Her music was largely unknown until it was featured on a 2004 radio show. In March 2009, a compilation album of her work, How Sad, How Lovely, was released.
Converse attended Concord High School, where she was valedictorian and won eight academic awards, including an academic scholarship to Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. After two years’ study, she left Mount Holyoke and moved to New York City.
She started calling herself Connie, a nickname she had acquired in New York. She began writing songs and performing them for friends, accompanying herself on guitar. She began smoking during this time and started drinking; traits strongly contrary to her religious upbringing. Possibly as a result, her parents rejected her music career, and her father never heard her sing before his death.
Converse’s only known public performance was a brief television appearance in 1954 on The Morning Show on CBS with Walter Cronkite, which graphic artist Gene Deitch had helped to arrange. In 1956, she recorded an album for her brother, Phil, titled Musicks (Volumes I and II). By 1961 (the same year that Bob Dylan moved to Greenwich Village and quickly met mainstream success), Converse had grown frustrated trying to sell her music in New York. That year, she moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where her brother Philip was a professor of political science at the University of Michigan. Converse worked in a secretarial job, and then as a writer for and Managing Editor of the Journal of Conflict Resolution in 1963. Following her move to Michigan, she mostly ceased writing new songs.
In August 1974, days after her 50th birthday, Converse wrote a series of letters to her family and friends, discussing her intention to make a new life somewhere else. She wrote, “Let me go. Let me be if I can. Let me not be if I can’t. […] Human society fascinates me & awes me & fills me with grief & joy; I just can’t find my place to plug into it.” With her letter to Philip, Converse included a check and a request that he make sure that her health insurance was paid for and in good standing for a certain amount of time following her departure, but for him to cease paying the policy on a certain date.
Converse was expected to go on an annual family trip to a lake, but by the time the letters were delivered, she had packed her belongings in her Volkswagen Beetle and driven away, never to be heard from again.
The events of her life following her disappearance remain unknown. Several years after she left, someone told her brother Philip that they had seen a phone book listing for “Elizabeth Converse” in either Kansas or Oklahoma, but he never pursued the lead. About ten years after she disappeared, the family hired a private investigator in hopes of finding her. The investigator told the family, however, that even if he did find her, it was her right to disappear, and he could not simply bring her back. After that, her family respected her decision to leave, and ceased looking for her. Philip suspects she may have taken her own life—he specifically thinks she may have driven her car into a body of water—but her actual fate remains unknown.
Converse was very private about her personal life. According to Deitch, she would respond to questions about her personal life with curt “yes” or “no” answers. Both Deitch and Connie’s brother Philip have said it is possible she might have been a lesbian, although she never confirmed or denied this notion.
“How Sad, How Lovely,” a compilation of Converse’s lo-fi recordings from the nineteen-fifties, was released in 2009 by Squirrel Thing Records, a label created by Dan Dzula and David Herman. Some years prior, Dzula had happened to hear Gene Deitch interviewed on the WYNC show “Spinning on Air,” hosted by David Garland, and Deitch had slipped in a mention of Converse and played one of his old home recordings of her. Dzula prepared a box set of her complete recordings, including a number of previously unknown tracks and deep cuts that will come as a revelation to Converse’s fans, the ranks of whom seem to increase exponentially with every passing year. A documentary is also in the works.