About

Connie Converse was the quintessential musical enigma—an artist before her time, forgotten, and disappeared without a trace over 50 years ago. If you stripped away the sharp literary mind, the precision of the songcraft, the bare honesty of her humble recordings, you would still be left with an unanswerable question: Where did she go? Why did she pack her belongings into a car, write goodbye letters to her friends and family, and vanish?

Between 1944 and 1949, Elizabeth “Connie” Converse dropped out of Mt. Holyoke College, traversed the country (contemporaneously ‘on the road’ with Kerouac) and eventually settled in New York City. While working as a journal editor and researcher, then graphic editor and typographer throughout the 1950s, she wrote and recorded a body of truly unique, plaintive, and haunting work. Some songs she recorded herself on reel-to-reel in her Greenwich Village apartment, others were recorded by friends enamored of her music, but almost none ever reached an audience wider than, as she once put it, “Dozens of people all over the world.” By the early 1960s, she decided to start afresh in Ann Arbor where, in 1974, Connie eventually wrote a series of goodbye letters to friends and family, packed up her Volkswagen, and disappeared. She has not been heard from since.

Connie’s music went virtually unheard for decades until 2004, when cartoonist Gene Deitch played his own 1954 recording of Connie’s One by One on David Garland’s WNYC radio program, Spinning on Air. Dan Dzula heard this broadcast and was transfixed: How does the world not already know about Connie Converse…and how can I hear the rest of her songs? After several years, those answers materialized so he and friend David Herman started a record label of their own. That tiny label has shifted names and identities over the years (Lau derette > Squirrel Thing Recordings > Heroic Cities > The Musick Group) but its core purpose remains the same: to share Connie Converse and other great music with the world.