They never found a body. They never found a car. She left a note. But no one ever heard from her after that. The way I imagine it goes like this: August 1974. She’s in one of her house dresses, and there’s music playing on the car radio. Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she was living at the time, disappears. It is replaced with a network of freeways, backcountry roads, and railroad tracks, first laid in the middle of the previous century. The flat upper Midwest becomes the Great Plains, the High Desert, the mountains, rivers, and streams, and eventually the Pacific coastline.
But I’m probably wrong. No one will ever know what happened to Elizabeth Eaton Converse and this is because she so very desperately did not want to be found.
And for a long time, she really did disappear without a trace. The music she wrote and performed as Connie Converse sat in a filing cabinet in Ann Arbor, while her family and friends resigned themselves to never hearing from her again. And they didn’t, they never did hear from her again. But in 2004, two NYU students heard an old bootleg recording of Converse on the public radio station, WNYC. Gene Deitch, an old friend of Converse, played the track. He had made the recording back in the ’50s at his kitchen table.
The students were spellbound by what they heard. A woman’s strange and beautiful alto, paired with just a guitar and a lot of tape hiss. One of the recordings was “One by One,” a particularly abstract and haunting song about two lovers walking together at night, close together but so very far apart. She sings about how, as lovers, they don’t walk two by two, “but it’s one by one/One by one in the dark.” The students were enraptured. In 2009, they released How Sad, How Lovely, the first-ever compilation of songs by Connie Converse.
It has been said that Converse was ahead of her time, but only just barely. She was one of the first modern singer-songwriters, arguably the first modern DIY musician (she recorded many of her songs by herself in her apartment on a Crestwood 404 reel-to-tape). She left New York City and Greenwich Village in 1961, the same month that Bob Dylan arrived. She had a small but dedicated group of fans, mostly friends. She had one moment in the spotlight: a performance for Walter Cronkite on CBS’ The Morning Show in 1954. But there is no surviving footage. Nothing came of it. Just some negatives in a scrapbook. The camera is trained on Converse’s face, and in one moment she’s looking at her guitar, and in the next her gaze is pointed almost at her feet. Like she is nervous, like there is something oppressive about the spotlight, the cameras, Cronkite, all of it.
There was very little precedent for what Converse was doing when she did it. Folk music, as it was thought of when Converse was working, commonly meant songs that had been passed down decades, with no known original author. But there was something uncommon and vulnerable, something deceptive and futuristic about Converse’s songs. They took traditional songwriting sensibilities and transformed them into new forms that, at the time, were impossible to market in any sort of commercial setting. It’s funny to think now about how shocking it must have been to hear Converse sing “Roving Woman,” a song about ladies habituating saloons and playing poker and going home with strange men.
The intimacy of Converse’s music feels doubly present on these recordings. They are inherently imperfect, full of tape hiss and false starts as Converse accidentally begins a song in the wrong key. Many of the songs on How Sad, How Lovely open with Converse talking, explaining what she was about to perform. “This has a biblical text,” Converse says in the opening moments of “I Have Considered the Lilies,” as she clears her throat. She’s just starting to play her guitar. “It goes like this! It’s a whole story,” she says at the start of “Unknown (A Little Louder, Love).” In other recordings, you can hear cars on the road, or people shuffling around in the background, whispering things, just out of earshot.
All of it creates this unearthly sense of loneliness. Converse wrote unbearably lonely songs, with protagonists who find their alienation to be almost sweet. On “Talkin’ Like You (Two Tall Mountains),” a place “called lonesome” is full of birds and squirrels and pigs and trees. It is not a state of exile, as you might think, to be separated from someone. When she sings, there is levity to her vocals. She sings like she is telling a child a story. A story about how it can be magical to be out on your own, not “in the need of company.” In Converse’s world, to be so lonesome is to be so free. She’s never resigned. Even if what she is singing about is heartbreaking, like how the you in question is someone who she misses greatly.
Converse’s songs, as she mentions in “I Have Considered the Lilies,” are all little biblical texts. They are stories of dreamers and travelers and men who will break your heart. Her writing is not unlike Emily Dickinson’s poetry. She traffics in allusion, in natural beauty, in alienation. Like Dickinson, she is also very funny. I’m drawn in particular to one poem of Dickinson’s and one song of Converse’s. In Poem 18, one of Dickinson’s most famous, she writes, In the name of the Bee— and of the Butterfly—and of the Breeze—Amen! In Converse’s “Honeybee,” she is dolorous when she sings about this small pollinator: “So, honeybee/Go and tell a starling/To go and tell my darling/To hurry home to me.” Converse’s attention to the natural world, like Dickinson’s, is full of longing and curiosity. It is a really profound song, capable of conveying a depth of emotion without saying much at all.
How can you listen to a song like “Playboy of the Western World,” and not feel transported, be made to think about your own past loves. “Oh he was elegant,” she sings, “Past all dreaming.” Then her syntax gets more strange, more allusive. She sings of Sheiks Araby, Shahs of Persia, Napoleon’s tomb, and refers to his old Ford as “Mercedes Benz à la mode.” On “Father Neptune,” Converse imagines her love going off to sea and being taken by the Roman god of water. “I’ve got a man with a beard and a tan/And a passion for the sea,” she sings in one sardonic moment. And then her guitar wanders. Her alto quivers. And then the funny part becomes the sad part and she starts to slow down. And her alto reaches the top of its register and she goes: “And if it were not for this I would sink to the depths of the sea.”
Converse’s style ostracized her at the time—Deitch had said her music was too hard to sell. When she performed at listening parties in the West Village, guests were often fixated on her strange appearance. “She dressed rather shabbily,” said a woman who saw Converse perform, “Like she had just milked the cows.” Deitch took it even further: “I wouldn’t be surprised if she was deprived sexually,” he once said. This clear sexism, paired with Converse’s unusual approach to making music, did not yield any success.
But in the decades that followed, countless women sat down and wrote vulnerable, personal music. And for many of those decades, none of them knew about Converse. It would be interesting, if you could rewrite history, to hear what Joni Mitchell thought of How Sad, How Lovely at the time she was working on Blue. Or Carole King when she wrote Tapestry. Like these artists, what Converse was writing was narrative, kinetic, joyful, complicated. Her songs seem to fall just one standard deviation away from being pop music. But because she struggled to find an audience for her music while she was alive, her work is often discussed in conversation with Daniel Johnston and Karen Dalton. Or maybe Vashti Bunyan, an outsider who did find an audience in her lifetime, and has cited Converse as a late influence.
She reminds me most of Angel Olsen—Pitchfork drew the comparison on a review of her album Halfway Home, in 2011. Unsurprisingly, Olsen is a fan, as are Greta Kline of Frankie Cosmos, Jeff Tweedy, and Karen O. It makes sense: All these artists make music about the intimacy of loneliness, about how strange and sad but also remarkable it is to be alive. As for me, when I listen to these songs, all I can think about is the place where I first heard them. I have my own inventory of loneliness that I associate with Converse. I think it was a friend’s boyfriend who told me about her music first. At the edge of my adolescence, away from home for the first time, at college in flat-as-a-board Ohio. Soybean fields and these hugely dramatic sunsets. How I was cold and wearing a denim jacket covered in patches. And how now, when I think about it, this psychogeography of my own must not have been too different from Converse’s in her last days, before she disappeared.
Fundamentally, you can’t be a happy person and write a song like “We Lived Alone.” You can find the world infinitely fascinating and vast, but you can’t be happy. Converse wasn’t happy. In her final days in Ann Arbor, she was almost catatonic. She was entering her fifties. Her life had not gone as planned. So one day she sat down at her typewriter and wrote a letter. “This is the thin hard sublayer under all the parting messages I’m likely to have sent,” she writes, “Let me go, let me be if I can, let me not be if I can’t.” She got her wish. When I say that Converse disappeared, I really mean it. Deitch’s decision to play his Converse tape on WNYC in 2004 was really the first time anyone had heard from her in any capacity in over a quarter century.
If Converse were here today, she would be nearly 101 years old. But if you listen to How Sad, How Lovely, there she is. Completely and totally alive. Laughing and breathing and fucking up by starting a song in the wrong key. It’s all there, unedited and totally perfect. Maybe she did OK when she left Ann Arbor and drove to God knows where. Maybe it went exactly the way I pictured it in my head, where she’s driving and it gets so beautiful and so vast. Exactly the way she sang it in “We Lived Alone.” So in the end, she really was as happy as a lark.
