5 Reasons Connie Converse is the Most Interesting Female Musician You’ve Never Heard Of
To those who knew her, Connie Converse was a musician, composer, cartoonist, poet, scholar, political activist, sister, daughter, and friend. She was indeed all of those things, but as one can tell from her haunting songs and personal writings, Converse was so much more. She was a human in a lifelong battle with herself. Each year brought more disappointment and loneliness as she struggled to connect herself to this world while seeking commercial success for her work. Despite her vigorous and expansive efforts to have a fulfilling artistic career, Converse was faced with a crippling sense of failure. In 1974 at the age of 50, she drove off in her Volkswagen Bug and was never heard from again. All that she left behind were some goodbye notes to a few family and friends and a filing cabinet full of her extraordinary life’s work.
In May 2010, after being haunted by her songs for several months, I realized that more people needed to know who Converse was and experience her amazing body of work. I set out to make a documentary about her life and finally finished it just a few months ago. The film is called We Lived Alone and had its world premiere at the Sensoria Film and Music Festival in Sheffield, England, this past October. Here are five reasons why the world needs to know about Connie Converse. If after reading this article you become more interested in Converse, her life, her writings, or her music, please feel free to contact me.
1) Connie Converse was most likely the first singer/songwriter in the modern sense (even according to the BBC).
After two years on a full scholarship to Mount Holyoke College, she quit school and moved to Greenwich Village to pursue a career in music. The year was 1944 which means that she was “on the folk scene” before “the folk scene” even existed. Converse predated the Bob Dylan crowd, and in the early 1950s, she was recording herself playing guitar and singing in her Grove Street apartment on a reel-to-reel tape machine. The sound of her songs evoke feelings of seclusion (she never performed in front of a real audience except for a 1954 appearance on The Morning Show with Walter Cronkite on CBS, but it was taped over and no further exposure came of this appearance) and the lyrics offer small glimpses into her lonely yet brilliant mind.
2) Converse was a very early four-track overdubber.
Using that same reel-to-reel tape machine, Converse was quite experimental in her compositions. She often recorded over herself to create eerie descants to the choruses of her songs. The version below of “Down This Road” doesn’t have the descant (it’s an unreleased track that was found deep in the filing cabinet), but hopefully that will be accessible to the public soon.
3) She was a polymath.
There was really nothing that she couldn’t do, and she did it all extremely well. Paint portraits? Yes. Become editor of an academic journal without a degree? Yup. Draw political cartoons? Mmhmm. Write Poetry? Piano operas? Children’s stories? All of the above — and all of the evidence is right there in her filing cabinet.
4) Converse was radical.
When Converse lived in NYC and later when she moved to Ann Arbor in the early 1960s, she was very politically active. Throughout her lifetime she marched on Washington for women’s rights, created blueprints for an Ann Arbor community center and was probably a member of the Communist party. Her family thinks that she kept it secret from them so they wouldn’t get in trouble. One of her songs, “Roving Woman,” is a sly criticism of her conservative New Hampshire Baptist roots.
5) Converse was downright hilarious.
Many of her songs are laced with subtle yet biting humor. Her wit was unstoppable, and her friends and family would often remark that her sense of humor lit up the room wherever she went. Her most goofy lyrics are found in the fragment of a song called, “A Little Louder Love”:
Once there was a trumpeter who blew is love a ballad
That was not enough for her, so he blew her a lobster salad.
Blow a little louder, love
Show me that you’re thinking of your honey
Blow a little louder, love
Show me that you love me
BONUS! She also completed a series of insightfully funny, single-panel cartoons called Educating Henry based on her and her little brother Phil’s relationship growing up:
For more on We Lived Alone, the Connie Converse documentary, check out connieconversedoc.com!
-
Gretchen Unico