Connie Converse

From Concord to Greenwich Village

Elizabeth Eaton Converse was born in Laconia, New Hampshire on August 3, 1924 and raised in and around Concord, in a strict Baptist family; her father was a minister and her mother musical. She was valedictorian at Concord High School and went to Mount Holyoke on a scholarship, left around 1944 and moved to New York, where she became Connie. She worked as a secretary at the Institute of Pacific Relations and wrote articles for its journal, the Far Eastern Survey, from 1949 to 1951.

She wrote songs from about 1949 on; her biographer Howard Fishman counts more than sixty songs and fragments composed through 1969. In 1952 she taped herself singing for her parents. In 1954 Gene Deitch, an animator and friend who ran a tape machine, recorded her at a music salon and in his kitchen, and the same year she appeared on CBS's The Morning Show with Walter Cronkite, her only known public television appearance. In 1956 she made Musicks, two volumes of tape for her brother Philip, who later wrote that she described her audience as dozens of people all over the world.

She moved to Ann Arbor in 1961 and became managing editor of the Journal of Conflict Resolution in 1963. In August 1974, at fifty, she wrote letters to family and friends, drove away in her Volkswagen Beetle and was not seen again.

Found

In January 2004 Deitch played "One by One" on WNYC's Spinning on Air, and Dan Dzula and David Herman, who heard it, set up a label to release the tapes. How Sad, How Lovely appeared on March 5, 2009 on Lau Derette. Howard Fishman first heard her in 2010 at a holiday party, where the song was "Talkin' Like You", and spent about twelve years on the biography To Anyone Who Ever Asks (Dutton, 2023). Connie's Piano Songs (Monkey Farm, 2014) sets her art songs for soprano and piano; the Sad Lady EP appeared in 2020 and the complete Musicks tapes in August 2023, for what would have been her ninety-ninth birthday.

The soprano Julia Bullock's Walking in the Dark, which includes "One by One", won the Grammy for best classical solo vocal album in 2024, and a reissue of How Sad, How Lovely on Third Man Records followed in 2026. Pitchfork gave the compilation 9.4 and AllMusic four and a half stars; in AllMusic's words, Fred Thomas called her lyrics playful, spacy and even somewhat psychedelic.