Elizabeth Eaton Converse (born August 3, 1924 – disappeared August 10, 1974) was an American singer-songwriter, best known under her professional name Connie Converse. She was active in New York City in the 1950s, and her work is among the earliest known recordings in the singer-songwriter genre of music in the U.S. Before and after the period in which she wrote her music she was an academic, writer, and assistant editor for the Far Eastern Survey (IPR, New York), and editor for the Journal of Conflict Resolution (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor).
In 1974, Converse left her family home in search of a new life and was not seen or heard from again. Despite the obscurity of her music during her lifetime, her work gained recognition after it was featured on a 2004 radio show. In March 2009, a compilation album of her work, How Sad, How Lovely, was released.
Early life
Converse was born on August 3, 1924, in Laconia, New Hampshire. She was raised in Concord, New Hampshire, as the middle child in a strict Baptist family; her father was a minister and her mother was "musical", according to music historian David Garland. Her elder brother by three years was Paul Converse; her younger brother by five years, Philip Converse, became a prominent political scientist.
Converse attended Concord High School, where she was valedictorian and won eight academic awards, including an academic scholarship to Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. After two years' study, she left Mount Holyoke and moved to New York City.
Career
During the 1950s, Converse worked for the Academy Photo Offset printing house in New York's Flatiron District. She first lived in Greenwich Village, then in Hell's Kitchen and Harlem. She started calling herself Connie, a nickname she had acquired in New York. She began writing songs and performing them for friends, accompanying herself on guitar. She began smoking and drinking during this time, behaviors contrary to her religious upbringing. Possibly as a result of her changes in behavior, her parents rejected her music career. It was thought that her father never heard her sing, but a tape recording of a family visit in 1952 reveals that Converse sang for her father and mother in her apartment in Grove Street, New York.
In 1954, Converse was encouraged by a friend to perform at a music salon hosted by the graphic artist and audio enthusiast Gene Deitch, who recorded the performance. Converse's only known public performance was a brief television appearance in 1954 on The Morning Show on CBS with Walter Cronkite, which Deitch had helped to arrange. In 1956, she recorded an album for her brother Philip, Musicks (Volumes I and II). By 1961, Converse had grown frustrated trying to sell her music in New York. That year, she moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where her brother was a professor of political science at the University of Michigan. Converse worked in a secretarial job, and then as a writer for and managing editor of the Journal of Conflict Resolution in 1963.
Activism Converse spent many years after being a performer as an activist writing memos like Converse's "FEDD" Memo Against Racism and publishing her thoughts on the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).
Around 1968–69, Converse wrote a memo as a white member of People Against Racism. Written as a seven-and-a-half page memo under the heading "AN EXPERIMENT TOWARD 'IDEOLOGICAL' CONSULTATION" outlined in five sections lettered A to E. Section A covered the "Basics" such as "Me and My goals" and strategies like "There is probably no one 'correct method' of combating white racism. Neither racism nor society itself is that simple." Section B was an expansion on the basics. Section C defined what "FEDD" stood for: "I am coming to realize that the essence of racism is a 'frozen' pattern of exploitative domination/dependence between persons and between groups."
The overall memo reads like a manifesto to eliminate white racism and confront the structural or institutional oppressive forces that "perpetuate the status of black people as perennial losers in my society."
In a 2023 New York Times article framing Converse as a hidden figure akin to Bob Dylan, biographer Howard Fishman wrote on her time at the Institute of Pacific Affairs, "Ms. Converse lost her job when the institute landed in the cross hairs of the anti-Communist House Un-American Activities Committee." In Fishman's biography of Converse, To Anyone Who Ever Asks (2023), her published thoughts are recorded on the witch hunt that followed and targeted her colleagues, including Owen Lattimore, editor of the Pacific Affairs (a journal published by the institute), whom Joseph McCarthy accused of being "the top Soviet agent in North America."The IPR was investigated by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS), Chaired by Senator Pat McCarran, a close ally of McCarthy. See: Institute of Pacific Relations : hearings before the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee To Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws, Subcommittee Investigating the Institute of Pacific Relations, Eighty-Second Congress, first session, part 1. (1951) Fishman, quoting Converse, writes: We have become a nation of awful paradox: hysteria inlaid with unconcern, literacy woven with misconception, democracy wrapped up in tyranny, boldness nailed down by fear. I have no doubt of the outcome, but I dread the interval.
Personal life
Converse was private about her personal life. According to Deitch, she would respond to questions about her personal life with curt "yes" or "no" answers. Both Deitch and Connie's brother Philip have said it is possible she might have been a lesbian, although she never confirmed or denied this notion. We Lived Alone: The Connie Converse Documentary, directed by Andrea Kannes. Her nephew Tim Converse has said there is no evidence that she was ever involved in a romantic relationship. Her family noted that Connie relied more heavily on smoking and drinking towards the end of her time living in Michigan.
Disappearance
By 1973, Converse was burnt out and depressed. The offices of the Journal of Conflict Resolution, which meant so much to her, had moved to Yale at the end of 1972 after being "auctioned off" without her knowledge. Converse's colleagues and friends pooled their money to give her a six-month trip to England in hopes of improving her mood, to no avail. Her mother requested that she join her on a trip to Alaska, and Converse grudgingly agreed. Her displeasure with the trip appeared to have contributed to her decision to disappear. Around that time, Converse was told by doctors that she needed a hysterectomy, and the information appeared to have devastated her according to her brother.
In August 1974, days after her 50th birthday, Converse wrote a series of letters to family and friends suggesting her intention to make a new life in New York City. All were handwritten, according to author Howard Fishman, who wrote her biography (titled after a letter she typed and left behind in her filing cabinet): TO ANYONE WHO EVER ASKS: (If I'm Long Unheard From)
This is the thin hard sublayer under all the parting messages I'm likely to have sent: let me go, let me be if I can, let me not be if I can't. For a number of years now I've been the object of affectionate concern to my relatives and many friends in Ann Arbor; have received not just financial but spiritual support from them; have made a number of efforts, in this benign situation to get a new toe-hold on the lively world. Have failed.
...In the months after I got back from my desperate flight to England I began to realize that my new personal incapabilities were still stubbornly hanging in. I did fight; but they hung in.
...To survive it all, I expect I must drift back down through the other half of the twentieth twentieth, which I already know pretty well, to the hundredth twentieth, which I have only heard about. I might survive there quite a few years—who knows? But you understand I have to do it with no benign umbrella. Human society fascinates me & awes me & fills me with grief & joy; I just can't find my place to plug into it.
So let me go, please; and please accept my thanks for those happy times...I am in everyone's debt. In a different letter to Philip, Converse included a check and a request that he make sure that her health insurance was paid for and in good standing for a certain amount of time following her departure, but for him to cease paying the policy on a certain date.
Converse was expected to join an annual family trip to a lake, but by the time the letters were delivered, she had packed her belongings in her Volkswagen Beetle and driven away, never to be heard from again. The events of her life following her disappearance remain unknown. Several years after she left, someone told her brother that they had seen a phone book listing for "Elizabeth Converse" in either Kansas or Oklahoma, but he never pursued the lead.
About ten years after she disappeared, the family hired a private investigator in hopes of finding her. The investigator told them that even if he did find her, it was her right to disappear and he could not bring her back. After that, her family respected her decision to leave, and ceased looking for her.
Legacy
In January 2004, Deitch—by then 80 years old and having lived in Prague since 1959—was invited by New York music historian David Garland to appear on his WNYC radio show Spinning on Air. Deitch played some of the recordings of Converse he had made on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, including her song "One by One". Two of Garland's listeners, Dan Dzula and David Herman, were inspired to track down any additional recordings of Converse. They found two sources for Converse's music: Deitch's collection in Prague, and a filing cabinet in Ann Arbor containing recordings which Converse had sent to Philip in the late 1950s. In March 2009, How Sad, How Lovely, containing 17 songs by Converse, was released by Lau Derette Recordings. That same month, Spinning on Air broadcast an hour-long special about Converse's life and music. Garland also explored the mystery surrounding her disappearance with recordings from Philip Converse and readings of her letters by actress Amber Benson.
In 2015, How Sad, How Lovely was released as an 18-track vinyl recording by Squirrel Thing Recordings, in partnership with the Captured Tracks label. The album has received favorable reviews, including by Los Angeles Times music critic Randall Roberts, who wrote, "Few reissues of the past decade have struck me with more continued, joyous affection as How Sad, How Lovely." The Australian singer-songwriter Robert Forster describes the album as "making a deep and marvelous connection between lyric and song that allows us to enter the world of an extraordinary woman living in mid-twentieth-century New York."