Connie Converse

A screech of tires, a frantic phone call, a set of muddy footprints leading off into the dark woods.

But the disappearance of Elizabeth Connie Converse didn't start with a bang.

It started with a whisper, and then a slow, deliberate fade into the American ether.

If you were wandering the smoky, dimly lit streets of New York's Greenwich Village in the early 1950s, long before Bob Dylan ever picked up a harmonica, you might have crossed paths with her.

They invited her to small gatherings, trying to get her to play for crowds.

An animator named Gene Deitch even recorded her in his kitchen, hoping to help her catch a break in the music industry.

But the world, the world wasn't quite ready for Connie Converse.

The record executives didn't know what to do with a quiet intellectual woman singing achingly sad complicated songs.

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Connie Converse, like, these incredible overlooked artists.

Yes, yes.

Yeah, I, I noticed a theme in the people that I w- I've been listening to, what I'm making the record and also just now, like, I think a lot of the people that I'm drawn to are artists that, like, didn't get recognition at their time.

And honestly, it brings me to a very kid place, where I'm like, "That's when I was making music for, like, true, true, true love of it, and nobody's hearing it, just me and a guitar," like, singing from a very heart place.

Um, and Molly Drake is a big one for me.

Connie Converse, huge.

I mean, she's, like- Has a crazy story ever also.

Be happy you were born when you were, 'cause if you were born 100 years ago, you wouldn't be able to watch Dirty Dancing or Mulholland Drive or a five-hour Martin Scorsese documentary about George Harrison.

You wouldn't be able to listen to Captain Beefheart or the Cocteau Twins or Connie Converse or Tina Turner.

Be happy you can eat figs in March, look at photos of old friends and of dead parents.

I've got a photo of my dad when he was 24, the year he met my mum, when he was a singer in a house band at a holiday camp in Great Yarmouth.

The re-release of UFO in 2010 exponentially outperformed the original release and the same year it was promoted on Coast to Coast AM, where people called in with their theories on the mysterious disappearance of the talented James Sully Sullivan.

Number eight, Connie Converse.

Born Elizabeth Eaton Converse August 4, 1924 in Laconia, New Hampshire, Connie was raised by religiously strict parents in a time that was difficult for women to break through into professional music careers.

Converse would win a college scholarship but would never even finish high school, choosing instead to pack up and move to New York.

Being exposed to the counterculture of the Bohemians and the Beatniks in the 1950s, Converse started her music career in the exclusive Greenwich Village, New York scene.

In 1974, Connie Converse would go missing, and her disappearance would become as much of an enigma as much of her life was.

In 1954, a friend of Converse helped her record her first set of songs in the kitchen of their home.

Working for a printing firm at the time, Converse was passionate about her music and would later be attributed as the first modern singer-songwriter.

I think Blake is interesting, too.

I mean, if we're, yeah, if we're going that road, it's, like, there's Melville and his sort of, like, naturalist mysticism, and there's, like, Honestly, there's Connie Converse, another person who's kind of in the mythic mode and drawing out these stories.

These are all people who are a little out of step with their moment.

Yeah.

It's a stretch to call it animated because it's more like taking still drawings from a children's book and filming them, putting slight little bits of action to it maybe, but it's not... animation per se yeah and it's like no version of the hobbit that you've ever seen because they they changed the story around quite a bit i mean you know you've got bilbo you've got gandalf thorin is the only dwarf though and there's a princess who falls for bilbo and it's like okay where where's this coming from so yeah it's one of those cases where it's like in name only the hobbit uh type of thing but yeah look for it on youtube it's an interesting curiosity

i'll have to try out then One of the things also just outside the animation sphere that fascinated me was I discovered there was this pioneering folk artist called Connie Converse who Dyche essentially discovered.

He made the only recordings of her.

She disappeared without a trace, apparently, in the 1970s.

An animator named Gene Deitch even recorded her in his kitchen, hoping to help her catch a break in the music industry.

But the world, the world wasn't quite ready for Connie Converse.

The record executives didn't know what to do with a quiet, intellectual woman singing achingly sad, complicated songs.

They wanted polished.

In 2004, Gene Deitch, the man who recorded Connie in his kitchen half a century earlier, was invited onto a music history radio program.

He brought along those old dusty reel-to-reel tapes.

For the first time in 50 years, Connie Converse's voice went out over the airwaves.

Two young music producers happened to be listening.