Description

Shortlisted for the Plutarch Award for best biography

The mysterious true story of Connie Conversea midcentury New York City songwriter singer and composer whose haunting music never found broad recognitionand one writers quest to understand her life

This is the mesmerizing story of an enigmatic life When musician and New Yorker contributor Howard Fishman first heard Connie Converses voice on a recording he was convinced she could not be real Her recordings were too good not to know and too out of place for the 1950s to make sensea singer who seemed to bridge the gap between traditional Americana country blues folk jazz and gospel the Great American Songbook and the singersongwriter movement that exploded a decade later with Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell

And then there was the bizarre legend about Connie Converse that had become the prevailing narrative of her life that in 1974 at the age of fifty she simply drove off one day and was never heard from again Could this have been true Who was Connie Converse really

Supported by a dozen years of research travel to everywhere she lived and hundreds of extensive interviews Fishman approaches Converses story as both a fan and a journalist and expertly weaves a narrative of her life and music and of how it has come to speak to him as both an artist and a person Ultimately he places her in the canon as a significant outsider artist a missing link between a now oldfashioned kind of American music and the reflective complex arresting music that transformed the 1960s and music forever

But this is also a story of deeply secretive New England traditions of a woman who fiercely strove for independence and success when the odds were against her a story that includes suicide mental illness statistics siblings oil paintings acoustic guitars crosscountry road trips 1950s Greenwich Village an America marching into the Cold War questions about sexuality and visionary forward thinking about race class and conflict Its a story and subject that is by turn hopeful inspiring melancholy and chilling