Becoming One With Life

The Musical Mystery of Connie Converse
by Delfin Vigil, San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer

One by one, the years passed from the 1974 summer day when Connie Converse packed up her Volkswagen Bug, leaving behind letters to loved ones that said maybe they’d see her again or maybe they wouldn’t.

And one by one, the odds grew against the chance that anyone outside those who knew her would ever hear the dozens of folk songs that friends and family always believed would make Converse famous.

Now, nearly 35 years after she gave up on her music and perhaps her life, Converse’s music is being resurrected by an indie record label run by two New Yorkers who stumbled upon her recordings.

“When I first heard Connie’s music, I just thought, ‘Wow, this is great. I wonder whatever happened to her,’ ” says David Herman, 25, who with business partner Dan Dzula, also 25, created Lau derette Recordings, which will release Converse’s debut album, “How Sad, How Lovely,” on Tuesday. The two discovered her music in 2004, after Gene Deitch, a friend of Converse and connoisseur of rare recordings, randomly played a scratchy, two-minute version of a Converse song “One by One” during a broadcast on WNYC public radio.

“What makes her music so haunting and ephemeral is to know that it could have easily been lost forever. It was bizarre to think that this person who lived in New York for 10 years and wrote all these great songs could be completely forgotten. To think that people can exist, yet if no one continues to remember them, after a certain period of time it’s like they never existed at all.”

As it turns out, that is precisely how Converse, a New Hampshire native who wrote the bulk of her songs while living in Greenwich Village during the 1950s, used to feel.

“She looked like she could be a nun,” Deitch says of his first impression of Converse when the “plain-looking lady in thick glasses,” awkwardly carrying an acoustic guitar, showed up at his Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., home in 1955 to records songs. At the time, Deitch was an amateur recorder who would bootleg rare jazz 78s onto reel-to-reel tapes for fellow fans.

He also used the machine to capture live recordings of musician friends, the most famous of which was Pete Seeger. In the 1940s, while living in Detroit, Deitch engineered some of the earliest recordings by John Lee Hooker, then an unknown kid. William Bernal, a friend of Deitch’s known for always introducing him to the next cool thing, demanded that Deitch give Converse a listen.

“She said she wanted to play a song for me that she had just written, called ‘One by One.’ It went right straight to my heart,” says Deitch, now in his 80s and living in Prague after a career in animation. “She wasn’t the greatest singer, technically speaking. But there was poignancy in her voice. In the 1950s, I didn’t know of anyone commercially who sang as personally as she did. Especially not a woman. But there was also this undertone of sadness. She didn’t overtly show it, but you could certainly sense it.”

For about a year and a half, Converse continued to record at Deitch’s home, gradually creating a catalog of dozens of songs - all her own material. The mostly melancholy and sometimes sarcastic lyrics sang of a big, bearded sailor with a nice tan, or a hard-drinking, poker-playing “roving woman” who didn’t mind not knowing who’d take her home.

“All of the songs had this subtext of being sexually unfulfilled,” Deitch says of what would have been provocative subject matter by mid-’50s standards. “Yet she was not outwardly sexy in any way. It was very mysterious.”

Outside of their Friday-night recording sessions, Deitch knew little else about Converse. In 1955, Converse would have been 31. She worked for a printing house in New York’s Flatiron district and lived in Greenwich Village. She never spoke of a boyfriend or hinted at any romantic relationship.

Neither did she appear to have a talent for pushing her music career. Although their mutual friends, Bernal and his wife, Bronte, tried to help promote her, Converse never hired an agent. Besides performing for friends at Deitch’s house, it doesn’t appear that Converse played any formal gigs while living in Manhattan. Her only public performance was a brief appearance on CBS’ “The Morning Show” with Walter Cronkite, which Deitch helped book through his work. Friends hoped it might lead to a break for Converse, but nothing came out of it.

“Connie was naturally pretty but on a grayish scale,” says Bronte Bernal, who got to know Converse between recording sessions at Deitch’s New York home. “She was so low-key, she could walk through a crowd and be invisible - which I guess was what she wanted. Not to be noticed. Except she did want her music to be outed.”

But by the late ’50s, Converse gradually lost touch with the Bernals and their circle of musician friends. Some of them went on to fame, including Deitch, whose animated short film “Munro” won an Academy Award in 1961. That same year Converse left New York and her music behind for Ann Arbor, Mich.

As with a lot of turning points in her life, Converse didn’t make a big fuss about leaving New York and starting over in Ann Arbor, where her younger brother Philip and his family lived.

“We were all rooting for her to make it to the big time, but it just never happened,” says Philip Converse, 82, a political science professor emeritus with the University of Michigan. “There was never a real conversation about it. She was clearly done with New York and rapidly found a spot in the university community.”

While in New York, Converse had kept in touch with her brother by sending demo tapes and letters detailing her musical aspirations.

“We called it the Song of the Month Club. We had such marvelous fun with each new one she’d send,” says Converse, who was slightly surprised by the rebellious and sexual subject matter in her lyrics. He knew his older sister as Elizabeth, the well-behaved and mature middle child of the Converse family, which was headed by their well-educated and strict Baptist minister father.

At her high school graduation, Connie Converse was not only valedictorian, but also won a number of academic awards. When his sister, also a painter and self-taught pianist, suddenly dropped out of a full scholarship at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts to seek her musical fame and fortune in New York, their parents were devastated.

“She was in full rebellion mode against a family that played no cards, drank nothing and so on,” says Converse, who supported his sister even then. She began going by Connie, a nickname someone gave her after she got to New York.

Upon arrival in Ann Arbor in 1961, Converse landed a secretarial job at the University of Michigan, then became editor of a journal for the school’s center for conflict resolution. Her politics were left-leaning, and she was good at expressing them. Her colleagues respected her as a political activist, feminist and all-around good person. But her only musical outlet was becoming more of a hobby, improvising and jamming with friends at parties. Connie’s nephew, Tim Converse, 47, a software engineer in San Francisco, often connected with his aunt through music.

After first hearing her music, “I knew there was something special about it,” he says. “I have only positive memories of her. But my general sense was that she was a sad person and depressed in ways that I didn’t understand at the time.”

By the 1970s, Connie was burned out and bored with her job. As an attempt to rejuvenate her spirits, colleagues pitched in to finance a six-month sabbatical to England. She later described the trip as the only time in her life when she allowed herself to have “unproductive fun.” Yet it is unknown whom she spent that time with, if anyone at all. Not long after returning, the journal where she worked shut down, and she also learned that she would need a hysterectomy, which further depressed her.

During the summer of 1974, Connie declined her brother’s invitation to join him at an annual visit to a family cabin at Glen Lake in Northern Michigan. Instead, she stayed in Ann Arbor as did another nephew, Tim’s older brother, Peter Converse. While the rest of the family was vacationing, Connie was loading things in and out of her brother’s attic.

Peter, 16 at the time, vaguely recalls his aunt telling him that she was headed back to New York. Phil thinks she might have mentioned something about someday heading out West, but that memory was recalled only years later. Tim, 11 at the time, remembers receiving a note from his aunt that referenced Tolkien’s “The Hobbit,” and “like Bilbo Baggins, she had to go.”

Connie left letters to several loved ones, alluding to her depression and a need to drift away. An excerpt from one draft, dated Aug. 10, 1974, and addressed to “Anyone Who Ever Asks:” reads,

“To survive at all, I expect I must drift back down through the other half of the twentieth twentieth, which I already know pretty well, the hundredth hundredth, which I have only read and heard about. I might survive there quite a few years - who knows?”

Since Herman and Dzula heard “One by One” on Deitch’s broadcast in 2004, many people have been asking what happened to Connie Converse. Still no one knows. Dzula and Herman attempted to track her down, but had no luck. A relative hired a private investigator and found nothing. A Chronicle search could conclude only that Converse’s Social Security number has not been registered as a death. If she committed suicide, as her farewell note hints and as most of her family tends to believe, her body was either never found or not identified. If alive today, she would be 85.

Among the belongings that she left behind in her brother’s attic was a filing cabinet that included rejection letters from music publishers. In her will, she left clear instructions that her brother Phil be in charge of all copyrights and control of her songs.

“This was without any prospect at the time, yet it was something still on her mind,” Dzula says. “From the moment I heard her song, I wanted to know who this woman was. I visualized a domesticated 1950s housewife. I was making too many assumptions for my own comfort level.”

Philip Converse was delighted to hear from the two New Yorkers, and somehow not surprised.

“I had been so depressed at the possibility that Connie’s songs would disappear from the face of the earth,” Converse says.

Now the world will get to hear the music of Connie Converse.

“I’ve accepted that we’ll never know what happened to Connie or whether or not she is still alive,” Dzula says. “In a way, our work is done. Twice as many people have heard her music than when she recorded it, and the album isn’t even out yet [ed. note: Lau derette released the 17 song album How Sad, How Lovely in March  2009, shortly after the publication of this article]. In that respect, Connie Converse is very much alive.”

(via metempsicosis)