Have You Heard Connie Converse’s Music?

I was going through a list of people who disappeared in the 1970s, missing persons cases which were never solved, and that’s how I first encountered Connie Converse and her artistry.

I was not aware of this rather fascinating folk artist who has enjoyed a posthumous bump in reputation in the last fifteen years. This is because a friend of hers back in the fifties had the foresight to make recordings of private performances of her songs, to save these, and then to promote them after her strange disappearance.

She was a thoroughly remarkable woman and apparently indefatigable until depression (not so treatable in her lifetime) got the better of her. I’d like to think she started over somewhere after she drove off into mystery. But more likely she was hiding her suicide from the eyes of the world. Probably it was that mid-century sense of propriety. Even her brother came to believe she was still in her car in some dark body of water, waiting to be discovered.

I’m not so sure she was the “first modern singer-songwriter,” but she certainly was a forerunner of the type. I think Howard Fishman’s comparison of Converse to Vivian Maier is an apt one. She certainly seems capable of bringing out a maudlin, contemplative streak in writers who attend to her erstwhile obscurity-shrouded oeuvre. I suppose that’s because one reckons and…