For each musician scoring a measure of lasting recognition there are multiple examples of the opposite. This is reliably due to a dearth of ability, though occasionally gifted artists do fall through history’s crevices. And sometimes they receive belated acclaim; so it is with Connie Converse, a folk-oriented singer-songwriter whose material, originally documented in the 1950s, remained unreleased and almost entirely unknown for decades. In 2009, 17 of her tunes were collected on How Sad, How Lovely; it’s just received the clear vinyl treatment with an extra cut by Squirrel Thing Recordings.
Every lost record has its own story to tell. In fact, many of those accounts are more remarkable than the music; they frequently include one or more of the following: being out-of-step with the era, eccentricities, conflict, flagrant bungling and flat-out bad luck. Additionally, there are tales of talented individuals who plainly lacked the aptitude for self-promotion, scenarios less gripping in unusual content, but ultimately ringing of truth.
Connie Converse was not adept at career-building. Her narrative is quite interesting however, though the positive circumstance of her music’s long-delayed emergence is tempered by the events of 1974, the year she packed up her belongings, wrote goodbyes to family and friends, and drove off in her Volkswagen Bug. None of those she left behind have heard from her since. If alive today, unlikely as the notes hinted at suicide, she would be 90 years old.
The “big break” is often simply possessing the knack for putting forward one’s best when the right person is in the room. After learning that Connie Converse, born Elizabeth Eaton Converse on August 3 1924, appeared on CBS’s “The Morning Show” with Walter Cronkite, some will assume she either blew it or just didn’t have the goods.
Frankly, that’s a misjudgment. It was 1954 and television was far from ubiquitous, the program’s slot wasn’t exactly primetime (it’s fair to speculate the audience as comprised mainly housewives), and her segment has been described as brief; that would mean one, two songs at most, and Converse’s oeuvre, sprinkled as it is with gems, benefits from prolonged exposure.
A number of How Sad, How Lovely’s tunes can be assessed as low-key, though they’re shrewdly so, joining her standouts to offer a sum of considerable worth. There’s no doubt Connie Converse was ahead of her time (for a contemporaneous comparison, think Peggy Seeger), but at this late date that’s not an uncommon accolade. What’s notable is how Converse, the daughter of strict Baptists who dropped out of college to seek fame as a musician in New York, struggled in Greenwich Village without the support of a scene.
Though she was in quiet rebellion, hers was not a bohemian life; glimpsing the B&W photo accompanying numerous articles on Converse, an obviously informal snap capturing her in conservative attire and stocking-feet as she plucks her guitar and sings beside a cluttered kitchen table, it’s easy to understand the first impression of Gene Deitch; that the plain-looking woman who walked through his door could be a nun.
Along with helping to arrange Converse’s date on “The Morning Show,” Deitch taped roughly half of How Sad, How Lovely in his house. He did the same for Pete Seeger and while living in Detroit in the ‘40s, John Lee Hooker, though Deitch, soon to be an Academy Award-winning animator, was an amateur recorder who mostly bootlegged rare jazz 78s onto reel-to-reel tapes for fans. His no-frills approach combines well with her self-recordings from the same period.
Deitch wasn’t her only ally; but while she performed for friends in his home, Converse apparently never played a professional gig or even hired an agent. By 1961, stalled in her aspirations, she left New York for Ann Arbor. Initially working as a secretary at the University of Michigan, where her brother Philip was a teacher, she became the editor of a journal for the school’s center for conflict resolution. Music was increasingly a hobby.
It’s upon listening to How Sad, How Lovely that Converse’s story really comes alive, and opening the set is one of her strongest tunes, “Talkin’ Like You (Two Tall Mountains)” exuding a leisurely prettiness bookended by slightly eerie singsong exposition. And the impressiveness of her lyrics persists in direct relation to the motions she predates; a whole mess of freak-folkers would’ve killed (figuratively speaking) to have authored the stanza “Up that tree, there’s sort of a squirrel thing/sounds just like us/when we were quarreling.”
The ditty “Johnny’s Brother” manages without strain to feel significantly older than it is, like a yarn spun beside the warmth of a frontier campfire. But “Roving Woman,” again registers years if not decades ahead of the curve, the words remarking upon cultural norms as they detail the title character’s drinking, gambling, and company kept with a series of men.
It reinforces Converse as much more than an uncovered curiosity; rather, she’s a legitimately fine songwriter and an able singer, which is crucial given the basic instrumental scenario and the storytelling objective as found in the attractive lilt of “Down This Road” and the plot-packed “The Clover Saloon.” The latter also sports some of her nimblest fingerpicking.
It and “John Brady” stress that Converse didn’t work in confessional mode. Yet even in her more upbeat pieces there is an undercurrent of melancholy. She was also perceptive and disciplined enough to know when a tune was finished, no matter if it totaled only one minute and fifteen seconds, as is the case with the vocally striking “We Lived Alone.”
It precedes “Playboy of the Western World,” How Sad, How Lovely’s most ornate and playful composition, the last facet nicely illuminated in “Unknown (A Little Louder, Love),” a forty second performance fragment elucidating Converse holding court in Deitch’s house on a work-in-progress wielding an overtly humorous quality.
If “Playboy of the Western World” is her broadest canvas, the gorgeous and achy “One by One” and the plea of a sailor’s wife “Father Neptune” further display her skill at economy, and the spacious saga “Man in the Sky” and “There is a Vine” expand on her writing’s capacity to sound handed down by generations. At the other end of the spectrum “Honeybee” and the title track reveal a flair for pop shading, and “Empty Pocket Waltz” presents the interweaving of rich vocals and resonant guitar.
Inspired by hearing Deitch play “One by One” on a WNYC radio broadcast in 2004, Dave Herman and Dan Dzula issued How Sad, How Lovely on their Lau derette Recordings. That CD edition ended with “Trouble,” a warm and succinct stab of classic balladry. It was a solid finale, but the Squirrel Thing vinyl tops it, closing with the superb “I Have Considered the Lilies.”
A conversational prologue gives way to appreciable structural sophistication, with much of the appeal deriving from a sturdy vocal cadence. Converse’s singing throughout the album is never in question, but here in particular her voice carries substantial emotional heft. Credit is due to Herman and Dzula for an outstanding job of restoring and sequencing these selections, which reportedly represent only a fraction of her recordings.
Sometimes an artist’s big break arrives long after they have stopped striving for it; in this instance it came via those who valued the music and shared it over a half a century later. Here’s hoping for another volume. Until then How Sad, How Lovely will suffice as testament to Connie Converse’s enduring brilliance.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
