Connie Converse

In August 1974, a fifty-year-old woman in Ann Arbor, Michigan, packed her belongings into her Volkswagen Beetle, said goodbye to almost no one, and drove away.

She had written letters to her family and friends before she left — thoughtful, careful letters, in which she said she was tired, that she felt she had failed, and that she wanted to go somewhere and try to start over. She asked them not to look for her. She said they might hear from her someday, or they might not.

They never did.

Decades later, the world discovered that the quiet, overlooked woman in the Volkswagen had been one of the most original songwriters of her generation — a lost pioneer of American music who had been writing intimate, sophisticated folk songs years before anyone else. By then, no one knew where she was.

Connie

Elizabeth Eaton Converse was born in 1924 in Laconia, New Hampshire, into a strict, religious New England family. Her father was a Baptist minister. She was brilliant: valedictorian of her high school class, she won a scholarship to Mount Holyoke College. But after two years, she left college and moved to New York City.

In New York, she worked at a printing company and began writing songs. She taught herself guitar. She called herself Connie. And in the late 1940s and early 1950s, she wrote dozens of songs — strange, beautiful, witty, melancholy songs about loneliness, love, desire and the small sorrows of everyday life, sung in a clear, plain voice and accompanied by intricate guitar.

At the time, there was nothing else quite like them. The great wave of singer-songwriters — Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez — was still more than a decade away. Connie was writing personal, poetic songs in a style that wouldn’t become popular until the 1960s.

She played them for friends at small gatherings in Greenwich Village. A friend, the animator and illustrator Gene Deitch, recorded her playing her songs in his kitchen in 1954 on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. That same year, she appeared on a CBS morning television show, singing one of her songs.

And then — nothing happened. No record label signed her. No one bought her songs. The world wasn’t ready for her.

Ann Arbor

By 1961, Connie had given up on music. Discouraged, she left New York and moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where her younger brother, Philip, was a professor at the University of Michigan. She found work as a secretary and later as the managing editor of an academic journal at the university, the Journal of Conflict Resolution. She was respected for her intelligence and editing skill. She wrote political essays. She was involved in civil rights and anti-war causes.

But friends and family said she grew increasingly unhappy over the years. She drank. She was depressed. She felt she had never found her place in the world. In 1973, she lost her job when the journal moved to Yale. Her friends raised money to send her on a trip to England to lift her spirits. It didn’t help.

The Letters

In the summer of 1974, around the time of her fiftieth birthday, Connie wrote a series of letters to her family and close friends.

In them, she explained that she had decided to leave. She wrote that she had come to feel that human society had no place for her, that she was exhausted, and that she wanted to make a new start somewhere. She mentioned possibly going to New York, or elsewhere. She arranged for her bills to be paid and her health insurance to be continued for a time. She asked people not to search for her.

Then, in August 1974, she got into her Volkswagen and drove off.

Her family respected her wishes for about ten years. Then, in the 1980s, they hired a private investigator to look for her. He told them that if she didn’t want to be found, there was little he could do. No trace of her was ever found — not her car, not a death record, not a single sighting.

Rediscovery

For thirty years, Connie Converse was almost entirely forgotten.

Then, in 2004, Gene Deitch, by then in his eighties, appeared as a guest on a radio show in New York and played one of the songs he had recorded in his kitchen half a century earlier. Two listeners were so moved that they tracked down the rest of the recordings. In 2009, they released an album of Connie’s songs called How Sad, How Lovely.

The album was a revelation. Critics and musicians hailed Connie Converse as a lost genius. Articles were written about her. Musicians covered her songs. A biography was published. Documentaries were made. Strangers around the world fell in love with the voice of a woman who had driven away and never come back.

The Question

There are a few possibilities about what happened to Connie Converse.

Many people, including some members of her family, have come to believe that she took her own life in 1974, perhaps by driving into a lake or river, or into the woods, somewhere far from home. Her letters, while they didn’t say this outright, carried a tone of finality and despair.

Others hope that she did what she said: that she drove away and started a new life under a different name, somewhere quiet, and lived out her days in peace, never knowing that the world had finally discovered her songs.

We’ll probably never know.

The Voice

What haunts me most about Connie Converse is the gap between when she needed the world and when the world finally found her. She wrote those songs in her twenties and thirties, sang them in small rooms for a few friends, and waited for someone to hear her. No one did. Thirty years after she disappeared, millions did.

If she’s out there somewhere, she would be over a hundred years old. But I like to imagine that somewhere, at some point, she might have heard her own voice coming out of a radio, singing a song she wrote at a kitchen table in 1954, and smiled.