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Title details for To Anyone Who Ever Asks by Howard Fishman - Available

To Anyone Who Ever Asks

The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse

by Howard Fishman
Howard Fishman
Audiobook
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1 of 1 copy available
Shortlisted for the Plutarch Award for best biography
The mysterious true story of Connie Converse—a mid-century New York City songwriter, singer, and composer whose haunting music never found broad recognition—and one writer’s quest to understand her life
This is the mesmerizing story of an enigmatic life. When musician and New Yorker contributor Howard Fishman first heard Connie Converse’s voice on a recording, he was convinced she could not be real. Her recordings were too good not to know, and too out of place for the 1950s to make sense—a singer who seemed to bridge the gap between traditional Americana (country, blues, folk, jazz, and gospel), the Great American Songbook, and the singer-songwriter movement that exploded a decade later with Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell.
 
And then there was the bizarre legend about Connie Converse that had become the prevailing narrative of her life: that in 1974, at the age of fifty, she simply drove off one day and was never heard from again. Could this have been true? Who was Connie Converse, really?
 
Supported by a dozen years of research, travel to everywhere she lived, and hundreds of extensive interviews, Fishman approaches Converse’s story as both a fan and a journalist, and 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. Ultimately, he places her in the canon as a significant outsider artist, a missing link between a now old-fashioned kind of American music and the reflective, complex, arresting music that transformed the 1960s and music forever.  
 
But this is also a story of deeply secretive New England traditions, of a woman who fiercely strove for independence and success when the odds were against her; a story that includes suicide, mental illness, statistics, siblings, oil paintings, acoustic guitars, cross-country road trips, 1950s Greenwich Village, an America marching into the Cold War, questions about sexuality, and visionary, forward thinking about race, class, and conflict. It’s a story and subject that is by turn hopeful, inspiring, melancholy, and chilling.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    May 2, 2023

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780593626924
      • File size: 406979 KB
      • Duration: 14:07:52

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 17, 2023
      Musician Fishman debuts with a rich biography of Elizabeth “Connie” Converse, an outsider folk singer-songwriter who lingered on the fringe of fame before disappearing in 1974 at age 50, four decades before the first official release of her home recordings earned her a cult following. Born in 1924 to conservative Baptist parents, Converse suffered through a restrictive upbringing in Concord, N.H., before moving to New York City in the 1940s, where she ran in a social circle for whom she would play at house parties. Fishman’s perceptive analysis of Converse’s songs illuminates their artistic and autobiographical influences, with the most attention paid to how the sexual liberation implied in such songs as “Roving Woman” may have been inspired by her affairs, contrasting with her reputation as an awkward loner. Fishman’s research is nothing short of remarkable; extensive interviews with friends, family, and coworkers blend with excerpts from Converse’s correspondence to chart her depression after reaching midlife and failing to make a name for herself in Manhattan, and though her fate remains a mystery, letters she sent before she disappeared suggest she either died by suicide or made a new start somewhere. The scrupulous detail sometimes slows the pace, but Fishman succeeds wildly in uncovering the anguish and beauty in Converse’s bewildering story. This should earn Converse some new fans.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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