To Anyone Who Ever Asks The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse

Howard Fishman, a musician and New Yorker contributor, hears a recording of Connie Converse and cannot believe she was real. Her songs sound too good to have gone unknown, and too far ahead of the 1950s to fit the decade that produced them.

Converse was a New York City songwriter, singer and composer. Her music draws on Americana (country, blues, folk, jazz and gospel) and the Great American Songbook, and it anticipates the singer-songwriter movement of Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell a decade later.

The legend that grew around her says that in 1974, at fifty, she drove away and was never heard from again. Fishman sets out to test it. He spends twelve years researching, travels to every place she lived, and conducts hundreds of interviews, working as both a fan and a journalist.

The result is a biography of her life and music, and a personal account of what her songs came to mean to him. It follows a woman raised in secretive New England traditions who fought for independence and success against the odds.

Her story runs through 1950s Greenwich Village, cross-country road trips and the early Cold War, and it includes mental illness, suicide and questions about sexuality. The tone shifts between hopeful and chilling.