Music

When Connie Converse, the ‘Female Bob Dylan,’ Lived in N.Y.C.

May 13, 2023
Cristin Caperton

Connie Converse was a pioneer of what’s become regarded as the singer-songwriter era, making songs in the predawn of a movement that experienced its roots in the Greenwich Village people scene of the early 1960s.

But her tracks, created a decade earlier, arrived just a instant also quickly. They didn’t capture on. And by the time the sun had come up in the type of a young Bob Dylan, she was currently long gone. Not basically retired. She experienced vanished from New York Metropolis, as she finally would from the planet, along with her music and legacy.

It was not until eventually 2004, when an N.Y.U. university student read a 1954 bootleg recording of Ms. Converse on WNYC, that her music started off to get any of the awareness and regard that had evaded her some 50 decades in advance of.

The scholar, Dan Dzula, and his mate, David Herman, were spellbound by what they read. They dug up more archival recordings, and assembled the 2009 album, “How Unfortunate, How Attractive,” a compilation of tracks that audio as even though they could have been written right now. It has been streamed above 16 million moments on Spotify.

Youthful musicians like Angel Olsen and Greta Kline now cite Ms. Converse as an impact, and musical acts from Significant Thief to Laurie Anderson to the opera singer Julia Bullock have covered her music.

“She was the feminine Bob Dylan,” Ellen Stekert, a singer, folk new music scholar and track collector told me through my analysis for a e book about Ms. Converse. “She was even superior than him, as a lyricist and composer, but she did not have his showbiz savvy, and she was not intrigued in producing protest music.”

Seventy-five a long time in the past, Ms. Converse was just yet another young artist making an attempt to make finishes meet in the metropolis, singing at dinner get-togethers and non-public salons, and passing a hat for her performances.

She realized that her tunes did not jibe with the saccharine pop of the day. “This sort of thing always curdles me like a dentist’s appointment,” she wrote to her brother before an audition at Frank Loesser’s audio publishing company, the place she predicted what executives would say of her tunes: “lovely, but not professional.”

In January 1961, the same month that Dylan arrived from the Midwest, Ms. Converse left New York for Ann Arbor, Mich., where she reinvented herself as an editor, a scholar and an activist.

In 1974, a week right after her 50th birthday, she disappeared and was under no circumstances found all over again.

Ms. Converse lived in New York from 1945 to 1960, and although she was intensely private, she stored a diary, scrapbooks and voluminous correspondence that have been left powering following she drove away for fantastic, featuring clues about what the Manhattan chapter of her lifetime was like. Right here are some of the neighborhoods, venues and web-sites around the town that offered the musician with a backdrop for her short but trailblazing stint as a songwriter.

In 1944, after dropping out of Mount Holyoke Faculty in Massachusetts, Ms. Converse moved to New York. Her to start with position was at the American Institute of Pacific Relations, where she edited and wrote posts about global affairs. “I am struck by the breadth of the matters she lined,” claimed the up to date global relations scholar Michael R. Anderson, who phone calls her producing and reporting “remarkable.”

She lived on the Higher West Facet. The picture of her in Riverside Park, higher than, was uncovered in an outdated filing cupboard that belonged to the photographer’s widow. It is a single of the initial recognised illustrations or photos of Ms. Converse in New York.

Some of Ms. Converse’s closest good friends lived and hung all around the bohemian enclave recognized as the Lincoln Arcade, a building on Broadway among West 65th and 66th Road. With a status as a haven for struggling artists, it experienced been dwelling to the painters Robert Henri, Thomas Hart Benton and George Bellows, the very last of whom experienced lived there with the playwright Eugene O’Neill.

The group was a challenging-consuming lot, offered to keeping court docket late at evening. A single surviving member of that crew, Edwin Bock, advised me that Ms. Converse would frequently be clattering absent at a typewriter, at a get rid of from the rest, though often she did things he observed shocking, like climbing out the front window nicely previous midnight to stand on a ledge, quite a few stories earlier mentioned the road.

Ms. Converse lost her job when the institute landed in the cross hairs of the anti-Communist Property Un-American Routines Committee. Sometime late in 1950, she moved to the West Village and commenced a new section of her life as an aspiring composer and performer.

She bought a Crestwood 404 reel-to-reel tape recorder and began making demos of herself singing new songs as she wrote them. It was in this article, even though residing by itself in a studio condominium at 23 Grove Road that Ms. Converse wrote practically all of her “guitar song” catalog (including every thing on “How Unhappy, How Lovely”).

The Village at that time “was the Remaining Bank of Manhattan,” the writer Gay Talese informed me, and it experienced “whiffs of the potential in it” in terms of its permissiveness about way of life possibilities. Nicholas Pileggi, a author and producer, advised that provided her address, Ms. Converse, a loner, would have had no trouble hanging out by herself at Chumley’s, a former speakeasy.

The upstart guide publisher Grove Press was also just down the block, and she was shut to The Nut Club at Sheridan Square, wherever jazz musicians generally played, as well as the additional respectable Village Vanguard.

Her initial and only television look was in 1954, on the “The Early morning Show” on CBS (hosted that 12 months by Walter Cronkite), nevertheless how Ms. Converse secured the physical appearance and what she performed and talked about may perhaps in no way be recognised (exhibits at this time have been broadcast live no archival footage exists). Due to the fact the plan was staged in a studio above the major concourse at Grand Central and proven dwell on a large screen in the hall, everyone bustling by means of the station that morning could have seemed up and caught the younger musician’s one and only brush with success.

Ms. Converse was exceptionally near to her younger brother, Phil. When he visited her in the city for the initially time, Ms. Converse explained the reunion in her irregularly retained diary, noting that the two “met like strangers at Grand Central, and fell to reminiscing more than oysters.”

In 1955, Ms. Converse took up residence at 605 West 138th Road, in Harlem, quite a few blocks away from Strivers’ Row. There, she shared a 3-bedroom flat with her more mature brother, Paul, his spouse, Hyla, and their infant child, P. Bruce, a circumstance she referred to as “a charge-preserving evaluate.” The new condominium experienced an upright piano, which Ms. Converse applied to compose an opera (now considering the fact that shed), a collection of options for poems by writers like Dylan Thomas, E.E. Cummings and Edna St. Vincent Millay, and a music cycle primarily based on the myth of Cassandra who, according to Greek mythology, was specified the reward of prophesy but was then cursed by no means to be thought.

An avid theatergoer, Ms. Converse attended Jose Quintero’s 1956 revival of “The Iceman Cometh,” which designed Jason Robards a star and correctly released the Off-Broadway movement. “Did I point out that I saw an in-the-round manufacturing of ‘The Iceman Cometh’ very last thirty day period?” she wrote to Phil and his wife, Jean, that October. “Some 4 and a 50 percent hours of uncut O’Neill, but only the final 15 minutes found me squirming in my seat.”

At this erstwhile nightclub on East 55th Road, exclusive at the time for staying desegregated, Ms. Converse fulfilled the cabaret singer Annette Warren, who expressed interest in masking Ms. Converse’s tunes, and who would make at minimum two of them, “The Playboy of The Western World” and “The Witch and the Wizard,” staples of her display for many years to arrive.

Countrywide Recording Studios, at 730 Fifth Avenue amongst West 56th and 57th Streets, experienced been open for only a calendar year when Ms. Converse showed up in February 1960 to report an album. It was a solo session that, because she did just just one or two requires of each and every tune, only took a handful of several hours. The recording was a rumor right until 2014, when it was unearthed in Phil’s basement. An adman who was a fan of Ms. Converse’s audio had procured the recording session for her for free. That album, the only one she manufactured, continues to be unreleased.

Ms. Converse shut the circle of her peripatetic Manhattan existence by transferring again to wherever she’d commenced: the Upper West Aspect. This time, she lived in a brownstone on West 88th Road, a fifty percent block from Central Park. This was her very last regarded New York address by 1961, she was absent.

Her audio, typically built in isolation or at compact gatherings, was almost misplaced but for the attempts of her brother Phil, who archived what he could David Garland, who performed her music on WNYC in 2004 and 2009 and Dan Dzula and David Herman, the pupils who, a long time afterwards, launched her get the job done to a new era.

“The first time I performed a Connie Converse tune for a friend, she sat silently and cried,” Mr. Dzula stated. “From that minute I realized Connie’s magic would arrive at at least a few far more folks in a deeply personal and exclusive way.”

He added: “Could I have envisioned her blowing up like this when we 1st put out the report? Certainly not. But also, yeah, type of!”

Howard Fishman is the creator of the new e-book “To Any one Who At any time Asks: The Lifetime, Audio, and Thriller of Connie Converse.”