#Converse my story collection tv#

For the book, he found Converse’s family members and friends, many of whom have passed away in recent years.ĭuttonConnie Converse vanished in 1974.

His interest in Connie Converse dates back a couple of decades.

Active in the Greenwich Village folk scene of the 1950s, she ended up moving to Ann Arbor for a desk job at the “Journal of Conflict Resolution.” It was when she began a trip back to New York City to reinvigorate her artistic life that she disappeared.įishman, who was born and raised in West Hartford, is a touring musician himself as well as a contributing writer at the New Yorker magazine. Besides her haunting folk songs, she worked on an opera about farmers and a song cycle about Cassandra from Greek mythology.

#Converse my story collection tv#

She was interviewed on TV by Walter Cronkite, had some of her songs covered by other artists and was counseled by a number of people in the music business. There has since been an album of other people performing Converse’s compositions for piano as well as a tribute album.Ĭonverse was not a complete unknown. That album, “So Sad, So Lovely,” was reissued in 2015. It’s an amazing story of a couple of folk enthusiasts who tracked down amateur recordings of Converse and got them released as an album in 2009, 35 years after her disappearance. In his new book “To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse,” Howard Fishman rediscovers a folk singer who played primarily in her friends’ living rooms, never released an album in her lifetime and vanished altogether in 1974 when she was 50 years old. When writers say they’ve discovered unknown musicians, they’re usually talking about artists on small labels or based outside of big cities.