Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Outsider Studies: Connie Converse

Episode Date: June 20, 2023

The life of musician Connie Converse easily reduces down to one of those Hemingway length sad stories: Before Dylan there was Connie Converse and then she disappeared. In his new book “To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse” Howard Fishman gives us the complete tale. We meet up with Howard and learn why this incredible musician just couldn’t catch a break in 1950s New York City, and why he is devoted to her life and art. You can get a copy of Howard’s amazing book wherever books are sold or use this link

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. I've always had a thing for outsider artists, people who make music, art, take photos, but never find or found the recognition they should have gotten. Yeah, it's kind of perverse, this outsider business, because most outsiders are required to die before they qualify for outsider benefits. Also, the tragic or criminal or weird aspects about outsiders always tend to get highlighted by the people who are championing and in some cases selling their work. For example, when John Maloof made his documentary about his discovery of the photographer Vivian Meyer, he kind of turned her into this quirky nanny who had weird clothes and secretly shot photos on the side,

when in reality, she was simply just another super talented, unrecognized artist who supported herself with a day job. Howard Fishman's new book, To Anyone Whoever Asks, about the outsider musician Connie Converse, doesn't do any of that crap. His book is actually a love letter from one musician to another. In between two tall mountains There's a place they call lonesome My name is Howard Fishman, and we are sitting in my apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, listening to Connie Converse.

I'm never lonesome when I go there This is the first song of hers that I heard. It's called Talking Like You. Some people call it Two Tall Mountains. See that bird sitting on my windowsill Well, he's saying whip her will I heard it at a party in 2010, and because I'm a bit of a social misfit

when it comes to being in large gatherings of people, I was at this party and trying to avoid having small talk with people. And my means of doing that was to be very interested in the books on the shelves and to listen to the music that was on the box. And then this song came up. And it seized me because it felt like it was a song that I've heard a million times before and yet I also in that instant realized I'd never heard it before.

Up that tree that's sort of a squirrel thing sounds just like we did when we were quarreling. I heard so many influences at once in this music and it was all influences of things that I love so much. So I heard early country music. I heard early blues music. I heard pop standards. I heard a little bit of like Broadway, early Broadway show music, standards, things like that. And I heard something very personal. You know, she sounds unlike anybody else. They call lonesome Don't see why they call it lonesome

I'm never lonesome Now I live there I listened to it in its entirety, and when it was over, I asked the host what we were listening to, and he told me the little thumbnail sketch that anybody who knows anything about Connie Converse has heard, which is that she was a songwriter in the 50s. She made these recordings of songs that she wrote in her Greenwich Village apartment. She never had any success. And one day she drove away and disappeared and was never heard from again. On his way home from that party, Howard stopped at Earwax,

a record store near his apartment, and he picked up a CD containing all of Connie Converse's known recordings, a CD called How Sad, How Lonely. And when he got home, he put it on. He's listened to this record now, he told me, thousands and thousands of times. What I can now say is that I hear in her music all kinds of influences, and yet I hear somebody who was not copying or trying to recreate music that had already existed. So the elements that I hear,

the ingredients in her music are early country, blues, gospel, jazz, and pop music. I hear a smattering of 20th century art song. I hear a little bit of Broadway music. And then I hear what we now think of or describe, some people describe as singer-songwriter music, music in which the singer is the person who is telling the story. There's no separation between the singer and the narrator of the song. So I hear what Bob Dylan and company started doing about a dozen years later in this music. One thing many outsiders have in common is that they make their art or music in a place that tends to be hostile to the very idea of art and music. For me, this is one of the biggest mysteries of Connie Converse. Because you see, when she was making

her music in the 50s, she lived in New York City, in Greenwich Village. People loved music in Greenwich Village, especially the old weird music she was into. In fact, most of the people who owned Harry Smith's 1952 anthology of American folk Music were her Greenwich Village neighbors. It's the kind of music she was playing that made her an outsider. She was not looking back and trying to recreate old music. She was trying to take those ingredients and make something very new out of them. And nobody was doing that yet. The fact that she was making something new out of these ingredients seems to be what doomed her to failure.

Now, Greenwich Village in the 50s might have been an amazing place to live if you were an artist or a musician or a writer, but it was still a man's world. A lady never showed A bitch who waits to lose And that is where I find myself On many afternoons

This is Connie Converse's song Roving Woman in which she extols the virtues of day drinking, gambling and being taken home by strangers. People say a roving

woman is likely not to be better than she ought to be. So when I stray away from where I got to be, someone always tells me... Converse came from a very restrictive Baptist teetotaling family. And the idea that she would write a song about these subjects is wild. And, you know, I always say that one of the reasons that Converse didn't succeed in her time was because she wasn't interested in playing the roles that were available to women performers at that time, which were either the virgin or the vixen. But in this song, she actually is being a vixen,

but she's being a very kind of intellectual one, sophisticated, intellectual vixen, which I'm not sure the world was really ready for at that time. So Roving Woman is her declaration of independence, but it really fits in with the bohemian lifestyle Let me take you home. So Roving Woman is her declaration of independence, but it really fits in with the bohemian lifestyle that was becoming very popular. It had already been established decades before in Greenwich Village, but in the 50s it would soon have a new vogue with the Beats, the Beat Generation.

And she was just a tick ahead of the Beats in terms of the lifestyle that she was living and, of course, the road trips that she did, that she took. This was before On the Road. This was before people were taking cross-country road trips, and she was doing it as a single woman, which was even more surprising. There's positively got to be Someone there to take me home even more surprising. Over the course of his research, Howard discovered that Connie came

on the radar of some pretty important tastemakers of the time. Pete Seeger was aware of who she was. And the cartoonist, animator, and music obsessive Gene Deitch recorded her. Gene Deitch's son, the cartoonist Kim Deitch, has written about his memories of this impromptu recording session that took place at his boyhood home in 1954. And the way he tells it, everyone in the room recognized that this woman was a star one of gene's friends was so moved he got her what could or should have been her big break gene dyche had a best friend named bill bernal who was a uh a connector super connector, as his daughter described him to me as. And he was somehow able to take the recordings that Gene Deitch made

of Connie Converse performing in his home and use them as a demo that got her invited to appear on the CBS morning show, which was then hosted by Walter Cronkite. This was in May or June of 1954. And that appearance is a total head scratcher because she had no recordings to promote, no concert appearances to promote. So typically, you see somebody on a TV show, they're hawking their product or talking about some big thing that they have coming up. Converse had nothing coming up. So what in the world product or talking about some big thing that they have coming up. Converse had nothing coming up.

So what in the world was she talking about? And how was she even introduced? I wish, we all wish, I think, anybody who knows anything about Connie Converse, that this footage existed, but it doesn't. So all we can do is wonder. The recordings Gene Deitch made in 1954 are the ones we're listening to now. Like I said, Deitch was a music obsessive, and he loved sharing the music he collected and recorded. And in 2004,

50 years after that recording session, he went on a New York public radio program called Spinning On Air to promote a new book of his cartoons. And he brought some music to share, including this song, One by One. And driving down the highway, the New Jersey Turnpike, was a young Dan DeZula who heard the song, pulled his car to the side of the road, wrote down the name Connie Converse, and sat in stunned silence as the song played. He went home that night, looked for Connie Converse on the internet, found nothing, and

went to bed, but not without capturing the stream of the radio broadcast so that he could replay the song, which he would do over the next several years for both himself and for friends, waiting, as he told told me for the day when any moment somebody would put out the connie converse album as he told me he couldn't wait for that album to And when it didn't, he took it upon himself to do it himself. How Sad, How Lovely is the name of the album that Dan DeZula put out with his musical partner, David Herman, in 2009. They pressed 2,000 copies of the CD, sold it mainly in indie record stores and online, and as I always say, started a slow burn that has now become a raging fire, where she's got millions of listeners and followers and has influenced so many people all these years later, and it's just an extraordinary, extraordinary thing. Connie quit music and New York in the early 1960s. She'd had a difficult time trying to make it as a

woman on the scene in the 50s. And she believed it was only going to be harder for her now that she was older but let's face the facts here she wasn't even 40 she was not old she moved to ann arbor where her brother and sister-in-law were academics and she reinvented herself she got a job at the center for research on conflict resolution and she reinvented herself. She got a job at the Center for Research on Conflict Resolution, and she started editing and writing for the Center's journal. This was the beginning of the peace research movement, and Connie Converse threw herself into the work. For a while, she felt like she was doing some really important, incredible, meaningful, and satisfying writing. But all this ended as President Nixon bulldozed the country out of the 60s and into the 70s.

Things got kind of bleak for Connie. In August of 1974, she told her friends and family that she was leaving, and that they were not to come looking for her. And then, she was gone. A full copy of one of the letters will be linked in the description below, but I am going to read an excerpt from one of the letters that I found to be the best representation of her tone. Let me go. Let me be if I can. Let me not be if I can't. The idea of leaving behind a life to start over alone sounds like something out of a storybook or urban legend.

Was Connie able to actually achieve this? She then packed up in her tiny Volkswagen Beetle and left the city. Neither her car nor her body have ever been found. Her family and friends were unable to ever get in touch with her again. I did some looking and there's one unidentified body that seems similar to her description on the database, close to the area where she was last seen. While there aren't any pictures of this doe,

the Wyandotte doe, as I'm calling her, has features that seem similar to Connie's. It would be incorrect to say that Connie Converse is famous solely because of her music. Her mysterious disappearance is total bait for true crime fanatics. On YouTube, I found at least six videos authored by breathless internet sleuths. There are probably more, but the sixth one was just so awful, I stopped counting. The disappearance, unfortunately, it overshadows almost everything because it's so unusual.

And it's the first thing that people ask about. But I try to avoid making it the center of the conversation or even a major subject of the conversation because what happens before she disappears is so much more meaningful and important. And I think that her disappearance is just kind of a final giving the finger to, to the work, to the culture that didn't want her. Howard has recently got himself a dog, a new friend. Her name is Lily Pancakes. And while Miss Pancakes was adorable, she wanted to bark and chomp her toys loudly next to the microphone.

Hey, stop it. Stop it. So it was kind of a difficult recording session. We had a lot of starts and stops. Eventually, Howard suggested we just wait Miss Pancakes out. And so we chatted off the record until she calmed down and fell asleep on the couch. This is when Howard told me the unprintable truth about Connie Converse's disappearance. Just kidding. Everything Howard Fishman has to say about Connie Converse is in his book, and I can't recommend it enough. I put a link to where you can get it in the show notes for the episode.

But Howard did tell me a story that isn't in his book. An amazing story about his own musical career that is key to understanding his devotion to Connie Converse. You see, like Connie, Howard came to New York hoping to make it as a musician. And like Connie, he worked hard at doing his own thing. By the end of the 2000s, he'd put out a number of CDs and gone on a bunch of tours, but he still needed that big break. And so he went all out. He wrote and recorded three albums. And then in 2010, he released them all at once. I produced three back-to-back CD release shows.

This is back when there were CDs. So CD release shows at the Abrams Art Center on the Lower East Side. One night had New Orleans Brass Band backing me up. The next night had a string quartet and the last night had an 11-piece folk punk orchestra. It was all the money I had, it was all the time I had, it was all the creative inspiration I had, it was all the time I had, it was all the creative inspiration I had, it was everything, putting it all on the table. And less than 50 people showed up

for the entire, over the course of three nights. I mean it was incredibly embarrassing to me. It was very sad. And I didn't know, I didn't know what I was going to do next. And I was at a party a few weeks later, and that's when I heard Connie Converse for the first time. I realized in that moment, or later that night, maybe when I went home and started listening to her album. Here was somebody who was doing what I have always done, which is write music that mixes different influences that isn't easily marketable. And she was doing it at such a higher rate of originality than anything I could ever. She was like the best version of what I could ever hope to do.

And look at what happened to her. And so in that moment, I just felt like if I'm going to do any hustling from now on, it's going to be for her. Howard Fishman is the author of To Anyone Who Ever Asks, the music and mystery of Connie Converse. This episode was recorded and mixed by me, Benjamin Walker. The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's best podcasts.

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