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ONE OF THE NEW YORKER'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEARCHOSEN BY PITCHFORK AS ONE OF THE TEN BEST MUSIC BOOKS OF 2023ONE OF LOUDER THAN WAR'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEARSHORTLISTED FOR THE PLUTARCH AWARDINCLUDED IN PUBLISHERS WEEKLY'S SEVEN BOOKS FROM 2023 YOU SHOULDN'T OVERLOOK"It takes a great journalist to find the stories behind the mysteries we carry. Howard Fishman has done that with his superb examination of Connie Converse." - Ken Burns"Nothing short of remarkable." - Publishers Weekly"A massive and fascinating feat." - MOJO MagazineThe true story of Connie Converse - a mid-century New York singer and songwriter, who mysteriously disappeared - and one writer's quest to understand her life.
When musician and New Yorker contributor Howard Fishman first heard a Connie Converse recording, he was convinced she could not be real. Her music was too out of place for the 1950s to make sense - a singer who bridged the gap between traditional Americana, pop standards, and the singer-songwriter movement that exploded a decade later with Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. Fishman was determined to know more about this artist and how she slipped through the cracks of music history but there was one problem: in 1974, at the age of fifty, Converse simply drove off one day and was never heard from again.
After a dozen years of research, Fishman expertly weaves a narrative of her life and music, and of how it has come to speak to him as both an artist and a person. It is by turns a hopeful, inspiring, melancholy, and chilling story of dark family secrets, taciturn New England traditions, a portrait of 1950s Greenwich Village, of a visionary intellect and talent, and a woman who fiercely strove for independence when the odds were against her.
Who was this overlooked trailblazer, how did she come to make such complex and arresting music, and can Fishman discover what happened to the artist who disappeared?