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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Thanks for sharing part of your day with us. The American Museum of Natural History's new wing opens to the public tomorrow. The Gilder Center will display new scientific specimens. How is a butterfly conservatory and an insectarium, that is it, insectarium? Insectarium, something like that. I'll learn to say it by the end of the week. [chuckles] We'll speak to a museum entomologist about it. That is all in our future but now, let's talk Connie Converse.

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Let's hear some music from Connie Converse.

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That is Two Tall Mountains by singer-songwriter Connie Converse, a New York City resident in the 1950s who is the subject of a new book that details her mysterious story, as well as her complex and deceptively playful music. What makes Converse's story so mysterious? Well, for one thing, she disappeared in 1974. Got in her car the evening after President Nixon resigned in disgrace, and left her family and friends in Ann Arbor, without any indication of really where she was going.

At that point, she'd just turned 50 and spent the previous decade in Michigan as an activist, intellectual, organizing anti-war and racial justice protests. That was about 20 years after she stopped playing the guitar accompanied folk that she would later, much later, become known for. It actually wasn't until 2004 that anyone outside of a small circle had actually heard her music, and it was this very radio station WNYC that led to her work being made into an album 35 years after her disappearance. The catalyst was WNYC host David Garland's interview on a totally different subject with one of Converse's friends cartoonist Gene Deitch, who recorded some of her songs.

The book is called To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse. It was written with the detail of a journalist, the passion of a fan, and the era of a musician. It's author Howard Fishman also produced an album with performances of Converse's unrecorded piano works, and in 2015, he wrote and starred in a play featuring her music called A Star Has Burnt My Eye. The book To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse came out yesterday and Howard will be at Rizzoli Books on Monday, May 8th, at 6:00 PM, but he joins us now. Welcome.

Howard: Hey, Alison, thanks so much for having me.

Alison Stewart: What was it about her music that pulled you in? What was it about Connie Converse's life that intrigued you?

Howard Fishman: Well, I'll start with the music part. I was at a holiday party in 2010, and a Connie Converse song came up on the house speakers, and it froze me in my tracks. I asked the host, who we had just heard when the track finished, it was actually the song that you just played, Talkin' Like You. He said, "Oh, this is Connie Converse. She made this music in the 1950s in her little Greenwich Village apartment, but she never produced an album, never had any success, and one day she disappeared."

I think I probably asked him where he had heard Connie Converse. He probably said, "On David Garland's WNYC Show, specials Spinning On Air: Walking In the Dark. I think at that point, I wasn't listening anymore because my brain had already been completely overtaken by the ghost of Connie Converse. As I always say, she got under my skin and I couldn't get her out.

Alison Stewart: You also make this funny admission that you thought maybe she was like for a modern indie hipster doing the retro thing.

Howard: Absolutely. I went home that night. On my way home, I stopped at a record store and I bought the CD, which is called How Sad, How Lovely, and I started listening to her. That is absolutely the thought that I had. I thought there was no way that somebody was making this music in the 1950s. First of all, we would all know about her because it's so good. It's so good.

Also, nobody was making that kind of music in the 1950s. This was a good 10 or 12 years before Bob Dylan came along. What we think of now as the singer-songwriter movement hadn't happened yet. There was no context for this music at all, and yes, I thought she was a hipster from my neighborhood in Brooklyn, who had made up a name Connie Converse and dressed herself in some thrift store clothes, and created this back story about her disappearance in a way to sell her records, but it was really somebody today making those songs. I was wrong, obviously.

Alison Stewart: Well, let's hear a little bit about her real life. Where was she from? What kind of family did she come from?

Howard: Sure. Connie Converse was born Elizabeth Converse in August 1924. She grew up in Concord, New Hampshire. She had very strict Baptist parents, teetotaling parents. Her father was the head of the local Temperance Society. She got a full-ride scholarship to Mount Holyoke, went there for two years, and then dropped out to move to New York City, which was the first in a series of unpredictable radical moves she made throughout her life, the last of which, obviously, was her decision to disappear in 1974.

Alison Stewart: I have to imagine at that age, knowing that time and to get a scholarship like that to Mount Holyoke, she'd have to be really smart, and probably super creative and offbeat.

Howard: Incredibly smart, valedictorian of her class in high school, genius-level IQ. I think at that time, you didn't just thumb your nose at a full ride scholarship as she did. I think it shocked her family when she did choose to drop out and move to New York, and this was 1944. Just to set the context historically.

Alison Stewart: You cold-called her brother, Phil, cold email, I should say.

Howard: Cold emailed Phil, yes. The liner notes to the album How Sad, How Lovely included a note from her brother Phil. It didn't give any information about him. It just said his byline was Philip Converse. I did what any researcher would do. I got online and I found, "Oh, there's a Philip Converse in Michigan, who's a professor and a really respected political scientist." I looked into his background, from New Hampshire, from Concord, okay, this has got to be the guy. Yes, I cold emailed him out of the blue and said, "I'd like to talk to you about your sister's music if it's not too painful for you to talk about."

Alison Stewart: What was his response?

Howard: He responded within an hour. He said, "The main parts of the pain of this story happened almost 40 years ago, and we've long passed, gotten over the hardest parts of it. I'm very pleased to talk to anybody who's interested in my sister's music and how can I help you?"

Alison Stewart: What was his role in his sister's life that you could tell from your interviews with him?

Howard: After Connie Converse disappeared, he became the keeper for flame in terms of her music. I'm sorry, that's my dog in the background that's barking.

Alison Stewart: That's okay. We like dogs on this show.

Howard: Okay. He kept all of her old music reels, which were recorded on old reel, the reel tapes. After he retired in the '90s, he had those tapes digitized, and preserved and would send them to anybody who expressed any kind of interest in his sister. He also made up a little homemade folio, which included a biographical essay about her background, about her music, all of her lyrics, and he would send that as well. That book and record combination is a package that arrived in my mailbox within about a week of contacting Phil Converse.

Alison Stewart: It's almost like he'd been waiting for someone to ask.

Howard: I think he certainly was and he was very excited to have me interested.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to a little bit of One by One by Connie Converse. Your second chapter is an analysis of the song and you advise readers to play the recording 10 times. On the first listen, it is a stoic personal confession. Somewhere around the fifth or sixth play, it becomes a diagnosis of a spiritual malaise, hers and ours. By the 10th listen, the song's true nature becomes clear. It is an indictment. Let's take a listen then we can talk about it on the other side.

[music] That's One by One from Connie Converse. My guest is Howard Fishman. We're talking about the book To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse. What is it about that song that you would like people to listen to it upwards of 10 times? How does the interpretation evolve?

Howard: Well, first of all, that's the song that was played on WNYC in 2004 when David Garland brought Gene Deitch onto his show for a completely different reason. That is the song that by some miraculous aligning of the stars Dan Dzula the producer of How Sad, How Lovely heard it on the show, while he was driving down the New Jersey turnpike. He pulled over his car and he wrote down the name Connie Converse. Because of that moment, people know who she is today. We have Connie Converse's music to be part of our history, a history that was almost lost.

What is it about One by One? Well, she's talking about something very elemental to all of us, which is our need for connection. We all need it, and we all require it in order to have a healthy, fulfilled life. She spent her whole life, I think, looking for those kinds of connections that were not available to her. I think the song expresses in a way that is not at all self-pitying or self victimizing just that real sense of aloneness and despair that we all can feel from time to time, and it's quite moving.

Alison: I want to circle back to Gene Deitch because if you listen to that, it's obvious that it's not really a professional recording. He recorded her music. How did he come into her life? How did he come to be her audio biographer in a way?

Howard: Gene Deitch was a cartoonist and an animator in New York City, and he was part of a circle of people that would hold music parties, listening parties, where they would get together and listen to old records, and once in a while they would invite a live performer to come and perform for them. According to him, one day, this woman showed up at his doorstep while he was having one of these parties, accompanied by his very good friend Bill Bernal who introduced her as his latest discovery. With the tape machine rolling, Connie Converse pulled out her guitar and sat down, and began to astound the people that were at this party with these songs the likes of which no one had ever heard before.

Alison: You are able to help us understand a little bit more about what she was like and what her life like was at this time, actually, by interviewing people who were there. You were able to talk to a man named Edwin Bach, who spent some time around a young Connie when he was the boyfriend of her friend. Am I getting that right?

Howard: That's correct.

Alison: At the time. You talked to him and he was nearly 100.

Howard: I talked to him when he was 100 last year. I don't know when his birthday is he might be 101 now, but yes.

Alison: How'd you find him? What did you learn from him that helped you understand what she was like, not just as a musician, but as a person?

Howard: This was a very late-in-the-game incredible discovery. As I was closing down the research from my book I found the names of this group of women, three sisters from New Jersey, that Connie Converse was hanging out in the 1940s and through contacting members of their family, none of the sisters were still alive. One of them said, "Oh, we think Edwin Bach is still alive, and he may know something about this scene that she was hanging out in." I contacted Edwin Bach and he said, "Oh, I absolutely knew Connie. I remember her clearly. She was part of that scene. She would be at these parties that these girls would hold in what was then called the Lincoln Arcade Building."

It's now long gone. It's where Lincoln Center is now in what was then known as San Juan Hill. They would hold these late-night parties with, according to him, excessive abundant alcohol consumption late into the night, and according to his recollections, and he said he was at these parties many times that Connie Converse was there, she would be off to herself at a typewriter while the rest of them were hanging out in her own world.

That was part of the permissive attitude of everybody does whatever they want at the time. He said on at least two or three occasions that he could recall on separate occasions, at some point in the evening, she would get up from her typewriter without saying anything to anyone else, walk to the window, which was three or four stories above Broadway with no fire escape outside it, and no landing outside it, and slowly climb out the window until she was out on the ledge.

He said he, each time this happened, he was completely shocked and disoriented and didn't know what was going on. He was very concerned. The three sisters who were friends of Connie Converse's made him understand that this was just something that she did, and she would be back inside after a while. He felt that she would make her way across the side of the building in a downtownward direction, and would be out there for a long time before she finally re-emerged back into the room maybe a couple of hours later. Around 1945, 1946, 1947, before she started finding this outlet of writing songs to connect with people, Connie Converse was climbing out of windows in what seems to be possibly self-destructive thinking way.

Alison: I was going to say when we think about her mental health what did you get from your research about her mental health during this time?

Howard: Well, as a biographer and a reporter, I can't speculate. I can only report what people tell me, but as a person hearing a story like that, I can think that doesn't sound good. that sounds like somebody who is struggling.

Alison: My guest is Howard Fishman. The name of the book is To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse. We'll hear more of Connie Converse's music and we'll talk about her life after she left New York and her disappearance. This is All Of It.

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You're listening to All of It. On WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest this hour is author Howard Fishman. The name of his book is To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse. I want to remind people that Howard will be at Rizzoli Books on Monday, May 8th at 6:00 PM in conversation with the New Yorker's Sarah Larson. Before we talk about her life, and anything else, let's hear some more music. I'm going to play the track Trouble. What would you like people to listen for from Connie Converse Trouble?

Howard: Oh. It's one of my favorite songs. Just listen to the lyrics. They're magical.

Alison: Here's Trouble from Connie Converse.

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Trouble from Connie Converse. What was her assessment of the fact that her folk career didn't really get off the ground? She's clearly talented. She's out there playing. She's putting herself out there.

Howard: I think she was frustrated clearly. She says so in her letters. She talks about going to music publishing auditions, music industry auditions, and them saying the quote in one of her letters is "lovely, but not commercial." I think people just didn't know what to do with her. For one thing, she was a woman in what was then very much a man's world. She had that obstacle built in. Also she was making music that didn't fit with the current trends of the day and she was investing in her songs herself and her emotions in a way that wouldn't become commonplace for another decade or so. Today we're very used to singers and songwriters investing themselves in their lyrics and in their words and in their performance but in the early 1950s, there was still very much a remove between the singer and the emotions being expressed. There was a safety buffer built in so that the audience didn't have to feel too much, I feel like. Again, I wasn't there and I can only speculate but I think that people were uncomfortable with the level of emotion that were in her songs.

Alison Stewart: She did have one moment of exposure that you write about appearing on a morning show with Walter Cronkite around 1954. You put it in context for us. The morning shows weren't what they are today and there's not any video of it anywhere.

Howard: There's nothing.

Alison Stewart: Yes. How do we know what happened? Tree fell in the forest. We didn't hear. How do we know?

Howard: The only way we know it happened is a series of still photographs that somebody shot of the television set they were watching. The stills are in Connie Converse's scrapbook. Even then when I found the scrapbook and I saw the stills, I thought did somebody create these because there's no evidence anywhere in the CBS archives. Yes, Alison is holding up the book now. They have no record of her being on the show. There's no footage of it. It's not in any of the production logs. There's no contract, nothing not even a listing for Connie Converse being one of the guests that year.

Alison Stewart: She looks different than she usually looks. She does not have her glasses does on. She's manicured and quaffed.

Howard: Yes. According to at least one of the people that I talked to from back then she felt that Connie Converse really needed a makeover and that seems to be what they gave her at the CBS morning show for that one appearance because she does look very unusual there.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the book To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse. My guest is Howard Fishman. In 1955 she gets a miniature organ for her apartment which she called the Great Keyboard Solution. What did she mean by that?

Howard: I think that Connie Converse her mind never stopped working and evolving and she always wanted to learn more and be better at the things that she did. I think she found the guitar to be a limiting instrument in some ways because it only had six strings and as a compositional instrument, there's only so much you can do with it. There's a lot you can do with it but you can do way more with the keyboard. The fact that she was able to get first a miniature keyboard organ in her apartment and then to move into an apartment that had an actual upright piano changed the compositional style of the music that she was writing completely. Then she began writing art songs.

The soprano Julia Bullock recorded the song one by one on her debut album for Nonesuch last year and she placed it alongside the music of Samuel Barber and John Adams and I think really contextualized it as something that could be an art song as well even though it's played on guitar. Yes, she was interested in more formal music. I think it's a mistake to think of her as some people do as a folk artist.

Alison Stewart: Let's hear a bit of Vanity of Vanities featuring piano. This is from Connie Converse.

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This is a very special recording. It's the only one of the piano songs for which a recording exists. That's exciting when you think about hearing it.

Howard: For sure. I think the first time I heard it, it scared the living daylights out of me because it sounded so creepy and weird and uncomfortable and prickly. That's what a lot of her piano music sounds like. It's wonderful, but it's not in any way the delightful felicitous guitar music flavor of her earlier stuff.

Alison Stewart: What makes Connie Converse leave New York for Ann Arbor in 1961?

Howard: Yes, she left in January 1961 for the Midwest, the exact same month that a young Bob Dylan left the Midwest for New York. As I say in the book, they could almost have waved to each other from the road in passing. I don't know, and I can't speculate but it does seem to be that something happened, similar to the Mount Holyoke dropping out, similar to the 1974 disappearance, none of which are explained by anybody who knew her or in any of this surviving diaries or letters. She makes a radical sudden decision to completely change her life. She did it three times that I know of. In 1944, when she left Mount Holyoke, in January '61 when she left New York City, 1974 when she left Ann Arbor for good.

Alison Stewart: Was music a part of her life at Ann Arbor or did she just create a new world for herself?

Howard: She created a completely new identity. She reinvented herself and became dedicated to conflict resolution, to addressing institutional racism, police brutality, and fighting against what she felt to be the fascist forces in American culture and politics.

Alison Stewart: Is there any connective tissue between that life that she created for herself and her music from before?

Howard: No, but there is connective tissue to what she was doing before her music, because when she first got to New York, she was doing similar kinds of work with the American Institute for Pacific Relations. She spent about five years working and writing for them and editing their journal Far Eastern Survey, and was very invested in the ideas of trying to arrive at a better sense of world peace and how we can all get along.

Alison Stewart: We haven't given anything away. This is a big part of the story that Connie Converse disappears in 1974 on the night that Richard Nixon resigned. She gets in her car and she leaves. You have some notes that she left and she suggests that she might be thinking about going back to New York City, perhaps. In those letters what are some of the things leading up to her departure, the reason that she seems to need to make a move again?

Howard: My feeling is that it's almost like Connie Converse was a ghost or it's almost like she was like a supernatural being like from a Twilight Zone episode or a science fiction story where she moved through her life almost invisible. It was like people could not see her. She was talking about things and doing things and composing things that were so vital and so important and yet nobody could hear them or see them or read them. It was like she wasn't there. I think in 1974, she had arrived at a place of feeling like, okay, nobody can see me and I can't make myself known in any way that I've tried so I'm just going to stop and I'm going to go somewhere else where I don't have to try so hard and I'm going to try to figure out a different way.

Alison Stewart: She just cut no contact with family, no records of where she lived, nothing?

Howard: Correct. Yes, her car was never found, her body was never found. If she is alive today she'd be 98 years old.

Alison Stewart: If you could interview Connie Converse, what would you want to know? What would be your first few questions?

Howard: Oh my gosh. I think I would've a thousand different questions for her. I've never been asked that question though so it's a tough one to answer immediately. Yes I would just want to know why she made these decisions. What was going on, what happened? Yes, a series of whys, questions that would be a series of whys.

Alison Stewart: We're going to go out on the song I Have Considered the Lilies. Your dog's name is Lily. Is that a coincidence?

Howard: Yes. Her full name is Miss Lily Pancakes.

Alison Stewart: All right, we've been hearing from Miss Lily Pancakes as well as as Howard Fishman and this was one of the songs you wanted to make sure we played. Why is that?

Howard: Oh, I think all of her songs are fantastic and I don't necessarily think one is better than another. This one just happened to be in my mind when I was asked to name a few great Connie Converse songs.

Alison Stewart: At the top of it, there's a little bit of chatter. What are we hearing?

Howard: Yes.

Howard: She's at one of these parties at Gene Deitch's house in 1954, and somebody, it might be Gene Deitch, it might be Bill Bernal, somebody in the nose says, "She has a song that is brand new that she hasn't played yet." She demurs and she says, "Oh, I'm not ready to do that yet." Then someone says, "Well, how about if we don't record this one and you can just play it for us?" And she says, "Oh, I can do that," and they record it anyway.

Alison: The name of the book is To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse. It is by Howard Fishman. It just came out this week. Howard will be at Rizzoli in conversation with the New Yorker's Sarah Larson on Monday, May 8th. Howard, thank you for being with us.

Howard: Alison, thanks so much for having me.

Alison: Here's I Have Considered the Lilies from Connie Converse.

Speaker 3: She has a song that she hasn't sung yet.

Speaker 4: Have you?

Connie Converse: I'd rather not try that, actually. I haven't tried it enough more to do it well.

Speaker 5: Why don't you just sing it and we won't record it?

Connie Converse: Oh, I can do that.

Speaker 5: I'd like to [unintelligible 00:31:01]

Speaker 3: Let's see how it goes.

Connie Converse: This has a biblical text.

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