Author(s): Howard Fishman

MUSIC WRITING & CRITICISM

The mysterious true story of Connie Converse, a New York musician who disappeared after making her one haunting album and was never seen again.

When musician and New Yorker contributor Howard Fishman first heard Connie Converse's voice, he was convinced she could not be real. Her recordings were too out of place for the 1950s to make sense - a singer who bridged the gap between traditional Americana and the singer-songwriter movement that exploded a decade later with Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell.

Howard was determined to know more about this artist and how she slipped through the cracks of music history but there was one problem: in 1974, at the age of fifty, Connie simply drove off one day and was never heard from again.

After a dozen years of research, Fishman 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. He discovers fans who Connie's music touched deeply and still remember the lyrics to songs they'd heard only once or twice over 50 years ago.

It is by turns a hopeful, inspiring, melancholy, and chilling story of dark family secrets, taciturn New England traditions, a portrait of 1950s Greenwich Village, and of a woman who fiercely strove for independence when the odds were against her. Ultimately, Fishman shows that Connie was a significant outsider artist, a missing link pre-empting the reflective, complex, arresting music that transformed the 1960s and music forever.