Howard Fishman: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse

NOTE: This co-presentation takes place at neighboring North Adams Public Library (74 Church St., North Adams, MA) not at MASS MoCA.

Join MASS MoCA’s Research & Development Store and the North Adams Public Library for a free reading, presentation, and book-signing of To Anyone Who Ever Asks, a title that was Shortlisted for the Plutarch Award for best biography.

The mysterious true story of Connie Converse — a mid-century New York City songwriter, singer, and composer whose haunting music never found broad recognition — and one writer’s quest to understand her life. The unreal voice, story, and recordings of Connie Converse are too good not to know, and too out of place for the 1950s to make sense — a singer who seemed to bridge the gap between traditional Americana (country, blues, folk, jazz, and gospel), the Great American Songbook, and the singer-songwriter movement that exploded a decade later with the likes of Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell.

And then there is the bizarre legend about Connie Converse that has 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 be true? Who was Connie Converse, really?

Supported by a dozen years of research, travel to everywhere she lived (including North Adams), and hundreds of extensive interviews, Fishman approaches Converse’s 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. Ultimately, he places her in the canon as a significant outsider artist, a missing link between a now old-fashioned 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, cross-country road trips,1950s Greenwich Village, an America marching into the Cold War, questions about sexuality, and visionary forward thinking about race, class, and conflict. It’s a story and subject that is by turn hopeful, inspiring, melancholy, and chilling.