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To Anyone Who Ever Asks

The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse

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To Anyone Who Ever Asks

By: Howard Fishman
Narrated by: Howard Fishman
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About this listen

A biography of the mythic singer songwriter Connie Converse, who mysteriously disappeared after recording her debut album and was never seen again.

When musician and New Yorker contributor Howard Fishman first heard Connie Converse's voice, he was convinced she could not be real. Her recordings were too out of place for the 1950s to make sense - a singer who bridged the gap between traditional Americana and the singer-songwriter movement that exploded a decade later with Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell.

Howard 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, Connie 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. He discovers fans who Connie's music touched deeply and still remember the lyrics to songs they'd heard only once or twice over 50 years ago.

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, and of a woman who fiercely strove for independence when the odds were against her. Ultimately, Fishman shows that Connie was a significant outsider artist, a missing link pre-empting the reflective, complex, arresting music that transformed the 1960s and music forever.

©2023 Howard Fishman (P)2023 Penguin Audio
Entertainment & Celebrities Women Celebrity
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finally, connie

I've waited years and years for a properly researched account of Connie Converse's life. This doesn't disappoint. Lovingly written and rendered. A must listen for any outsider art enthusiast.

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Brilliant and tragic

What a superb piece of storytelling - and journalism - this is. It brings to life another world, another age... people materialise out of the mists of the mid-20th century (a time that feels so recent and distant simultaneously) with utter clarity. Enigmatic, moving, occasionally slightly disturbing. I couldn't stop listening. How sad, how lovely.

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