At the end of 2010, Howard Fishman, a musician and writer, attended a party where he knew few of the other guests, and, as a way of managing his social anxiety, began a careful examination of the host’s bookshelves.
Suddenly, a curious song came up on the speaker—a woman singing ruefully about “a place they call Lonesome,” where, all around her, she hears the voice, feels the presence of, an absent love in a bird and a brook, in “a pig or two,” and, hilariously, in “a sort of a squirrel thing.”
Fishman couldn’t quite nail what he was hearing. It had, he thought, the melodic feel of an old Carter Family recording, but the guitar fingerpicking recalled Elizabeth Cotten, and the harmonic structure brought to mind the work of Hoagy Carmichael. Whatever. He was, let’s just say, bewitched, bothered, and bewildered. And determined to learn more.
The woman responsible for the disquiet, and for the song (“Talkin’ Like You”), turned out to be one Connie Converse, who wrote and recorded a fistful of engagingly quirky, enigmatic songs in the 1950s, during the decade and a half of her hand-to-mouth tenure in Greenwich Village and Harlem. But her songs about disconnectedness and anomie and thwarted love had never attracted a following.
“Converse was expressing in song what Edward Hopper and Mark Rothko were in painting, what Flannery O’Connor and Ralph Ellison were in fiction, what O’Neill and Wilder were in drama,” writes Fishman in To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse. “Unlike any of them, however, Converse was working in a vacuum. Her chosen medium of the pop song form was not one generally associated with existentialism.”
At the time there were no bins at the record store for what Converse was putting out: poetic numbers performed with nerve endings fully exposed. She was what, two decades later, would come to be known as a singer-songwriter.
Part biography, part social history, part music-theory colloquium, part inquest, To Anyone Who Ever Asks is Fishman’s cri de coeur effort to piece together the puzzle that was Connie Converse, to make the case for her singular talent, and to bring her songs—at long last—to the attention of the broad audience Fishman believes they deserve. In this way the book makes common cause with the documentaries Searching for Sugar Man, about the musician Sixto Rodriguez, and ’Tis Autumn, about the jazz singer Jackie Paris.
The highly precocious daughter of a Baptist minister and a teacher, Elizabeth Eaton Converse was born in 1924 and grew up in Concord, New Hampshire. She was an academic standout. But she also sculpted, drew cartoons, painted murals, wrote poetry and plays, and studied piano and violin—though no non-secular music was permitted at home.
Converse got the nickname “Connie” at Mount Holyoke, which she attended on a scholarship but, unaccountably, left after two years to go wandering. In 1944, she moved to New York and began working at the Institute of Pacific Relations, a private research organization where she wrote and edited articles about international affairs.
She taught herself guitar during her free time and began composing. Her first effort was a setting of the A. E. Housman poem “With rue my heart is laden,” but, soon enough, she was supplying her own lyrics.
“Converse was expressing in song what Edward Hopper and Mark Rothko were in painting, what Flannery O’Connor and Ralph Ellison were in fiction, what O’Neill and Wilder were in drama.”
What followed was small-scale validation and large-scale disappointment. Converse was a sensation at so-called listening parties at the homes of the artsy set, but few outside those salons knew what to make of this unwashed, unkempt, unusual girl. The consensus from music publishers: “lovely, but not commercial.” Nonetheless, Converse said, “optimistic people keep making appointments for me.”
In 1954, thanks to one of those optimists, Converse, whose voice Fishman likens to Dinah Shore’s, got a slot on CBS’s The Morning Show, then anchored by Walter Cronkite—to seemingly zero notice, never mind acclaim.
An adman who’d been a guest at a listening party called in a favor to book time for Converse to make a studio recording, but the master tape from the session was lost. The Cradle Will Rock composer, Marc Blitzstein, was, supposedly, keen to hear the opera Converse was writing; then, nothing.
Meanwhile, Elly Stone, a cabaret mainstay who became celebrated for her performance in the 1960s revue Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, was interested in including Converse’s song “How Sad, How Lovely” in her act. Stone’s interest was fleeting. And so it went.
In 1961, after 17 years in New York, unwept, unhonored, and unsung, Converse moved to Ann Arbor, where her adored younger brother and cheerleader in chief, Phil, was a political scientist.
Toward the end of the summer of 1974, depressed and in declining health, the 50-year-old Converse typed up a letter with the salutation “To Anyone Who Ever Asks,” packed up her Volkswagen Beetle, and drove away from her home in Michigan, never to be heard from again. “Let me go,” she wrote in her farewell note. “Let me be if I can, let me not be if I can’t.”
Connie Converse was a sensation at so-called listening parties at the homes of the artsy set, but few outside those salons knew what to make of this unwashed, unkempt, unusual girl.
Phil, the keeper of Connie’s meticulously curated file cabinet, was (along with that cabinet) a principal source of information for Fishman. For what it’s worth, there’s more than one suggestion in To Anyone Who Ever Asks that the siblings’ relationship was a mite too close. It’s a puzzlement, like much else about Connie, including her sexuality (maybe gay, maybe bisexual, maybe not) and her political leanings (likely a Communist).
Perhaps because many of those who knew Converse died before Fishman could interview them, perhaps because there was little in the public record, To Anyone Who Ever Asks has a rather high ratio of speculation to certainty. “If they had continued to share epistolary intimacies, and had their letters survived, what they wrote might have shed some light,” Fishman writes about the correspondence between Converse and a close childhood friend who later committed suicide. He summons the author and producer Nick Pileggi to paint a picture of life in Greenwich Village in the 50s and mentions that Converse lived on Grove Street. “Then she probably hung out at Chumley’s,” Pileggi tells him. Hmm.
Still, Fishman’s passion for his subject is contagious, his sense of mission inspiring. “In Connie Converse, I heard the sound of every artist who has ever been ignored or rejected because their work was too personal, too idiosyncratic, too unmarketable,” he writes.
Here’s the happy ending. An album of 17 Converse songs, How Sad, How Lovely, was assembled in 2009 (the title song and “One by One” are my particular favorites) and is available for streaming on Spotify.
Joanne Kaufman is a New York–based journalist and critic