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Availability Label | Location | Shelfmark | Availability | Reservations |
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Central Branch | Biography Conve-F | Copies Available |
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Title Statement | To anyone who ever asks: the life, music, and mystery of Connie Converse / Howard Fishman. |
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Author | Fishman, Howard |
Publication | New York: Dutton, Penguin Random House,[2023]©2023 |
Extent of Item | ix, 564 pages, 32 unnumbered pages of plates |
ISBN | 9780593187364 (hardcover) |
Other Number | pr06938397 |
Bibliography | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Summary | This is the mesmerizing story of an enigmatic life. When the author, a musician, 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. 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. |
Subjects & Genres | |
By Topic | Composers--Biography--United States |
Lyricists--Biography--United States | |
Missing persons--Biography--United States | |
Singers--Biography--United States | |
By Name | Converse, Connie,1924- |
By Genre | Biographies |