My whole THING in music is singer-songwriters, and I had never heard of Connie Converse until very recently. Which is a huge shame, because she was one of the earliest American singer-songwriters, and she wrote pretty wildly original music, often from a woman’s point of view.

She was raised in New Hampshire but went to NYC to play music in the 1950s. She lived in Hell’s Kitchen and Greenwich Village and wrote and played her own songs, which were oddly formal and kind of great. This was a decade before Dylan and Baez were playing there.

Everyone thought she was good! She got a TV appearance on the CBS Morning Show! But she never quite caught on - maybe ahead of her time. And in 1961 - same year Dylan moved to NYC and took off - she left, and moved to Michigan, where her brother was. She got a secretarial job.

She started drinking more, and was very depressed. She got a good job as the editor of a journal, but then the journal left Michigan for Yale. She was told she needed a hysterectomy, which was obviously upsetting. Her friends tried to help her, but her depression worsened.

In ‘74, she wrote letters to her friends and family, telling them she was planning to start a new life somewhere else. She wrote “Human society fascinates me and awes me and fills me with grief and joy. I just can’t find my place to plug into it.”

She took off in her car and drove away, and she was never heard from again. Her family hired a private detective, but he told them he couldn’t bring her back if he found her. It was her right to disappear. Her brother thinks she may have taken her own life.

And nobody heard anything of her and her music just kind of disappeared, too, until 2004, when a friend of hers appeared on a radio show and played some recordings on reel-to-reel that he made of her. Some listeners were inspired to track down her music.

And they helped put together what would become the album Sad and Lovely, which is much worth listening to if you care about singer-songwriters. There’s a formality to Converse’s singing that was more of the 50s, and it’s a lovely counterpoint to the 60s sound of the guitar.

It’s also another sad example of how many early women singers and songwriters, many of them immensely talented, ended up disappearing from the music scene and their achievements forgotten. It’s been hard to be a woman in music since the early days. Since forever.

Anyway I’m glad her music is back out there now, at least some of it, and I’ve been listening to it in juxtaposition with a lot of modern women singer-songwriters. It’s well worth it.