I first heard a Connie Converse song at a holiday house party in 2010. [...] I sought out the host. “Oh,” he said. “That’s Connie Converse. She made these home recordings in the nineteen-fifties, but never found an audience for her music, and one day she drove away and vanished.” The album we were listening to, he said, had just been released on a small Brooklyn label.
[...] In 1954, Converse was ushered by a friend, guitar in tow, to a semi-regular music salon hosted by the animator and audio enthusiast Gene Deitch in Hastings-on-Hudson. Deitch liked to record his guests, but when Converse walked in he thought twice. She seemed standoffish, a bit arrogant, and apparently unconcerned with physical appearances; at a time when women were being culturally prompted toward glamour, Converse wore no makeup, favored long, shapeless dresses, and tied her hair back in a practical bun—“like she had just come in from milking the cows,” according to one attendee. Reluctantly, Converse got out her guitar, Deitch rolled his tape machine, and she proceeded to stun those at the gathering with performances of her songs.
[...] In January, 1961, frustrated by her inability to find an audience for her music**,** Converse left New York. She was nearing middle age, with no significant professional, artistic, or romantic prospects. Her brother and his wife had made a life ensconced in the heady, liberal milieu surrounding the University of Michigan, and Converse chose Ann Arbor as a place to start over. She volunteered as a political activist, worked on a novel, and took a series of ever more demanding academic jobs that took a toll on her physically and mentally, eventually leading to a breakdown. In August, 1974, one week after her fiftieth birthday, she mailed a series of cryptic notes and letters to family and friends that spoke of a need to make a fresh start somewhere else, and quietly drove away. She was never heard from again.
If you're unfamiliar with Connie Converse, the 2016 feature in The New Yorker by Howard Fishman -- who produced a tribute album to Connie and a play about her -- is a great primer. Those are some excerpts above. Similar to "forgotten" folk singers Vashti Bunyan, Sibylle Baier, and Linda Perhacs, Connie's music went largely unheard for decades until gaining a cult fanbase in the internet era, but unlike those late '60s and/or early '70s artists, Connie's music dates all the way back to the mid 1950s. And it still sounds fresh today. A 2017 tribute album to Connie on John Zorn's Tzadik Records features Karen O, Mike Patton, Big Thief, Jeff Tweedy, Sam Amidon, Laurie Anderson, Martha Wainwright, Margaret Glaspy, and more, and other contemporary artists to either sing Connie's praises and/or cover her music include Angel Olsen, Frankie Cosmos, Haley Heynderickx, and Diane Cluck.