Billboard’s top-selling single of 1954 was “Little Things Mean a Lot,” a syrupy-sweet ballad sung by Kitty Kallen and laden with orchestral strings. Kallen’s soft coo — “Blow me a kiss from across the room/ Say I look nice when I’m not” — is the Eisenhower era incarnate; you can practically hear saddle shoes pitter-pattering a slow dance in the background. But revolution was already afoot. That was also the year of “Rock Around the Clock,” “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” and “Sh-Boom,” to say nothing of Brown v. Board of Education.
Into this combustible, in-between cultural moment stepped 30-year-old Manhattan songwriter Elizabeth “Connie” Converse, who appeared that summer on CBS’s new program “The Morning Show,” bearing her nylon-string guitar. Performing for host Walter Cronkite (whose routine on the show included regular discussions of current events with a puppet named Charlemagne the Lion), Converse played a few of her original compositions, which bore no resemblance to Kallen’s sentimental puff or the burgeoning teen genre of rock and roll. In the words of Howard Fishman, whose biography of Converse, “To Anyone Who Ever Asks,” culminates his 12-year odyssey to understand this beguiling talent, her work exists “out of time, out of music history altogether.”
Her broadcast TV appearance was the only time Converse received the slightest mainstream attention, and no video of even that brief showcase survives. She recorded no albums, her only performances occurred in New York City living rooms among friends and family, her songs were never recorded by other artists, and she was unknown even among the Greenwich Village folk music scene that arose just after she left the city for Ann Arbor, Mich., out of frustration, in 1961. Converse’s recordings — some made at those intimate parties, others made at home with rather advanced amateur gear for her time — weren’t publicly available until 2009, when the collection “How Sad, How Lovely” was compiled by curious obsessives Dan Dzula and David Herman, who sold copies online. Readers might reasonably wonder if such an artist merits a doorstop like this one.
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Fishman, a songwriter and musician as well as a cultural journalist, answers the question by turning Converse’s very lack of acceptance into its own subject. “To Anyone” is the grandly researched portrait of a talent who didn’t get her due, a kind of worst-case study of why this indignity remains a brutally common occurrence. In his epilogue, Fishman asks: “How many more Connie Converses are there out there — marginalized talents waiting to be heard; artists and thinkers lacking the emotional tools, the encouragement, the self-esteem, the community, needed to thrive?” He never quite identifies why Converse’s art remained obscure, but certainly she was unclassifiably eccentric in her fashion choices and artistic interests, never a middle-of-the-road mind. She also exhibited depressive, even antisocial, tendencies, which eventually overtook her life.
As her experience on CBS conveys, Converse was talented enough to command interest and attention, but star-crossed even by the standards of unfairly ignored geniuses. She excelled at pop songwriting, classical and opera composition, and prose. She worked for years on at least one novel, and the many letters that Fishman quotes are uniformly clever and expressive. But in August 1974, when she was 50, Converse got in her Volkswagen Beetle and drove away from her brother’s house, where she lived with him and his wife and sons, never to be seen or heard from again. Disappearance was her final act of creation, and — other than a major analytical piece she published with her Michigan employer, an academic journal dedicated to the subject of conflict resolution — the only effort she saw through to full completion.
Most readers will not even be aware of Converse, who sold no albums, won no awards and left no musical legacy. Fishman admirably establishes his subject’s greatness in purely artistic terms, lavishing heartfelt attention on her literate lyrics and her harmonic sophistication. He traces her compositional and writerly similarities to Brill Building pop, Tin Pan Alley and the more obscure regionalisms of Harry Smith’s “Anthology of American Folk Music,” while ultimately placing her outside any particular school or style. Though her voice-and-guitar work sounds like folk by default, “she had no interest in nostalgia,” Fishman writes. “Instead, she was concocting brand-new music ... more original, more personal, and arguably more artistically worthwhile than the often ersatz-sounding anthems being penned by the likes of [Pete] Seeger and the Weavers.”
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Individual listeners may agree or not with that assessment. Converse’s “guitar songs” are raw bootlegs of urbane and reserved tunes, not murkily mysterious folk documents like the low-fidelity blues recordings from the era. But Fishman’s passion for this music and his devotion to uncovering its origins are infectious, and form a secondary plot of the book. He first heard “How Sad, How Lovely” at a holiday party soon after its release, and couldn’t believe that music so modern, sophisticated and haunting was made while Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell were too young to drive. Fishman learned Converse’s songs and began performing them at his own gigs. He compelled a singer and pianist, Charlotte Mundy and Christopher Goddard, to make an album of Converse’s unreleased art songs, based in the German liede tradition. He tracked down Converse’s brother, hosts of parties she attended and surviving relatives of her friends. He found scholars and historians to appraise her work in contemporary terms. (They’re all left awestruck.) “To Anyone” is simultaneously the record of an obsession and its ultimate payoff. It’s hard to think of any book that grants such loving attention to an artist who has otherwise been denied it.
In that way it feels well suited to the 21st-century vogue for musical rediscoveries and reappraisals. Ever since the late tortured English balladeer Nick Drake found a new audience thanks to a 1990s Volkswagen commercial, forgotten or never-ran geniuses have been rescued from obscurity by record labels like Numero Group and Omnivore Recordings, documentary films like “Searching for Sugar Man” and “20 Feet From Stardom,” and enterprising artist-curators like Damon Albarn and Jack White. Connie Converse may never reach the broad audience that those projects found; her music is gorgeous but low-key and elusive, like candid black-and-white photos from a time when everyone smoked indoors. But “To Anyone Who Ever Asks” is a rich paean to it, and to the profound connections that art can form between individuals, even decades apart.
John Lingan is the author of “A Song For Everyone: The Story of Creedence Clearwater Revival” and “Homeplace: A Southern Town, a Country Legend, and the Last Days of a Mountaintop Honky-Tonk.”
To Anyone Who Ever Asks
The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse
By Howard Fishman
Dutton. 564 pp. $32
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