Connie Converse
| Connie Converse | |
|---|---|
| Birth name | Elizabeth Eaton Converse |
| Born |
August 3, 1924 Laconia, New Hampshire, United States |
| Died | Unknown |
| Occupation(s) | Singer-songwriter, Guitarist Composer |
| Instruments | Vocals, Guitar, Piano |
| Labels | Squirrel Thing Recordings |
| Website | Connie Converse |
Elizabeth Eaton "Connie" Converse (born August 3, 1924) was an American musician active in New York City in the 1950s. Her work is among the earliest known recordings of the singer-songwriter genre of music.
Converse left her family home in 1974 in search of a new life and was never heard from again. Her music was largely unknown until it was featured on a 2004 radio show, and released on the album How Sad, How Lovely in March 2009.
Converse was born in Laconia, New Hampshire in 1924. She grew up in Concord 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. She 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 Holyoke and moved to New York City. During the 1950s, she worked for the Academy Photo Offset printing house in New York's Flatiron District and lived in Greenwich Village. 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.
Her music came to the notice of animator and amateur recording engineer and cartoonist Gene Deitch, who had made tape recordings of John Lee Hooker and Pete Seeger in the 1940s. Deitch made a number of tape recordings of Converse in the kitchen of his house in Hastings-on-Hudson in the mid-1950s. Unfortunately this did not attract record labels, and although she was very introverted, she was also popular with friends and other artists, including Susan Reed who covered her songs on stage. Her only known public performance was a brief television appearance in 1954 on The Morning Show on CBS with Walter Cronkite, which Deitch helped to arrange. She most likely played quite often at social dinner parties of friends and other small, informal gatherings.
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