ANN ARBOR, Mich. – Elizabeth Eaton Converse “Connie Converse” was a singer-songwriter who was active in New York City in the 1950s.
According to the New Yorker, Converse was born on Aug. 3, 1924, in Laconia, New Hampshire. When she grew up, she moved to New York City to pursue a career in music.
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Her brother, Phil Converse, moved to the midwest. They stayed in touch. Throughout the years, she mailed her brother and his wife around three dozen songs she recorded in her tiny studio apartment in New York.
In January of 1961, she left New York to join her brother and his wife in the Ann Arbor area. According to the report, she volunteered as a political activist, worked on a novel and took a series of demanding academic jobs that took such a toll she had a mental breakdown.
It was within a week of her 50th birthday, in August 1974, that she mailed the “series of cryptic notes and letters” to her friends and family. She told them she needed to make a fresh start somewhere else. She was never seen again.
A compilation of recordings from the 1950s was released as an album in 2009 titled, “How Sad, How Lovely.” It was released 35 years after she vanished.
One of the most haunting songs in the album is “One by One,” a song she wrote at 3 a.m.
“One by one in the dark
We go walking out at night
as we wander through the grass
we can hear each other pass,
but we’re far apart
far apart in the dark”
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