Back in 2020 The New Existentialists played a gig at morning Magpie in Dunedin at the end of which Ka7e got up on stage with an acoustic guitar to play one or two songs. The first song was such a playfully melodic number, both funny and heartfelt, that both Hayley and I had to ask her what it was, and who it was by. The song was “Talkin’ Like You (Two Tall Mountains)” by Connie Converse, recorded in 1956, but not released until 2009 on a 17-song album called How Sad, How Lovely, and researching it brought up a story unlike anything else in popular music.
Elizabeth and Philip Converse were born, in 1924 and 1928 respectively, to a strict Baptist couple in Concord, New Hampshire. They were the smartest students their school had ever seen, and at one end-of-year prizegiving won so many of the prizes that the grudging applause soon turned to booing. Philip Converse became an influential political scientist (I’ll return to Philip later because he described a concept in The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics (1964) that’s applicable to both musical belief systems and streaming algorithms).
Elizabeth, who came to call herself Connie, found herself in New York with some songs in the early 1950’s, quite some time before Bob Dylan would make original, personal, imaginative folkish songs the next big thing. A friend recorded an album’s worth of these songs in rough demo form; some were sent to Philip. Performing “Talkin’ Like You” on TV - on Walter Cronkite’s Morning Show in 1954 - and selling one song to another female musician, were the highlights of her short career. Interest was limited – here was an artist truly ahead of her time, a woman singing her own songs, accompanied by herself on guitar. The claim is made that she was the first singer-songwriter, and if we define that term as it has become entrenched in our culture, she was.
Before she recorded her songs, and after, Elizabeth “Connie” Converse was a political activist and thinker. She probably joined the Communist party at one point; she wrote articles for the Journal of Asia-Pacific Affairs, including, in 1949, a very informative summary of the political position of Formosa (Taiwan). Moving to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1963 she became the editor of the Journal of Conflict Resolution during the Vietnam and civil rights eras. As a woman, and one without formal academic qualifications, she found herself working long hours supporting her male colleagues who took credit for, or took for granted, her hard work. At the height of the sixties counter culture, she stood out by dressing conservatively, in a 1950’s style. Her friends were in an experimental music group – she never went to see them play. She chain-smoked and drank spirits throughout the working day, as many did in academia (read Kingsley Amis’s biography) – you could do that then.
In 1968 Converse decided to summarize the content of the Journal for its contributors and readers; the resulting editorial, The War of All Against All, is the longest example of her written work available online. It’s an attempt to get back to first principles by defining what subjects were being included, what terms were being used in the Journal, how they were being used, how they were related, what they meant.
A rigorous lay attempt to expose the philology of a relatively new academic field, The War of All Against All contains some fascinating and prescient insights, as well as being an unusually open example of a first-class mind at serious work. I used the passage below as an epigraph for Last Days of the Internet EP.
The relationship between control and survival is not simple. The survival of an individual person may at times depend on his deliberate suspension of control over his situation. Information, for example, can be vitally important, but its very nature as information is vitiated if the receiver of it is controlling some aspect of its content.
Which probably seemed a bit abstract in 1968, yet reads like a menacing warning in the online and other media environment of today, when we have every means of controlling the content of the information we receive, indeed have little choice but to control it in some way, and so ought to give more thought to how we are doing it.
The War of All Against All received one published response in the Journal, Peace Research: The Cult of Power, from Berenice A. Carroll, which contained an idea which Converse used to generate one last insight in A Posteditorial, which she called Carroll’s fork, the distinction between power-as-dominance and power-as-competence. In modern terms this new paradigm can be seen as (for example) helping to establish the rights of the unpaid workforce, but can also be applied more widely to models of political legitimacy.* Connie Converse’s friends could see she was burnt-out and struggling and paid for a trip to England (1971), which didn’t help, and neither did a trip to Alaska with her mother. A doctor’s advice that she needed a hysterectomy depressed her further. By 1972, the Journal she had given so much was in difficulty (its position is described in A Posteditorial) and was bought up by a new publisher and its offices were being moved to another city. In August 1974 Connie Converse packed her belongings into her VW and disappeared. Literally – no-one ever heard from her again and her fate is unknown.
"Let me go. Let me be if I can. Let me not be if I can't. Human society fascinates me & awes me & fills me with grief & joy; I just can't find my place to plug into it."
Connie Converse’s story does remind me a little of Ruth Crawford Seeger’s – a talented, indeed brilliant composer in the 1920’s, a Communist who was told by her husband that “women can’t write symphonies” and who checked her privilege and dedicated herself to writing down the folk songs of the workers for the rest of her life (it seems likely that Connie would have learned some of these songs from her transcriptions). A similar, if internalized, process might explain why Connie Converse silenced herself and dedicated herself to thankless activism, but we’ll never know, and she is objective enough about the irrational beliefs of Communists in The War Of All Against All.
The Party’s demands aside, an anecdote from my personal experience may be relevant: in 2014 I began work as a nutrition researcher at AUT. I’d done such writing from love of it before, alongside making music, with no problems. But once I started spending 8-hour days on academic writing, I began to notice a seismic shift in my psyche. Some abilities I was using to create academic writing were similar to those involved in music making, some were not, and I experienced this dissonance as an existential split that I both felt and observed objectively, like a tourist watching an iceberg calving from a spot a little too close to it. I felt as if one mental persona, the “scientist” was separating from, then, becoming more powerful through increased exercise, replacing the other, the “artist”. My psyche survived of course, or at least I think it did, and when Covid later relieved me of most of my scientific responsibilities I fell back into full-time musical thinking, but this experience does help me to understand why Connie Converse’s musical production stopped soon after she moved to Ann Arbor and took up full-time academic editing.
After the Connie Converse recordings were released in 2009 avant garde composer John Zorn arranged the recording of a tribute album, Vanity of Vanities – A Tribute To Connie Converse, an impressive piece of musical archaeology given the recordings it’s based on, where the lyrics aren’t always easy to hear. The contributors include those aligned with the singer-songwriter tradition, like Martha Wainwright, experimental rock musician Mike Patton, Laurie Anderson and Petra Hayden, and various other names in serious American music. This means that we sometimes get a high art reading of a work more comfortably middlebrow, relatively unfinished songs are sensitively filled out, and differences between songs stand out. Converse’s muse is like a mixture of Hoagy Carmichael, Hans Christian Anderson and Dorothy Parker, and many of the songs sound ruefully autobiographical. “Talkin’ Like You” sounds like a sweet bucolic love song from a Rogers and Hammerstein musical if you don’t listen too closely to the words – “In the yard, I keep a pig or two – they drop in for dinner like you used to do”. The same relationship seems to be the subject of “Trouble”, a lyric worthy of Hank Williams.
Ever since we met the world's been upside down
And if you don't stop troubling me you'll drive me out of town
But if you go away
As trouble ought to do
Where will I find another soul to tell my trouble to?
Then my bed is made of stone
A star has burnt my eye
I'm going down to the willow tree and teach her how to cry
These witty, chirpy, and extremely catchy little tunes turn out to be full of heartbreak and questions. The most upbeat is “Roving Woman”.
Now, poker is a game a lady shouldn't play,
And every floatin' poker game just seems to float my way.
But long before I've lost a thing besides my comb,
Someone tips his hand to me and takes me home.
Don't see why they always do it -
Can't be vanity; must be sheer humanity -
When some kind soul remarks with great urbanity:
'Lady, let me take you home.'
Of course, there's bound to be some little aftermath
That makes a pleasant ending for the straight and narrow path.
And as I go to sleep, I cannot help but think
How glad I am that I was saved from cards and drink.
People say a roving woman
Is likely not to be better than she ought to be;
So, when I stray, there's positively got to be
Someone there to take me home.
Nothing, rather than little, is known about Connie’s private life.
Some of the most interesting versions on Vanity of Vanities are those with the most anachronistically modern readings: Elysian Fields’ gentle “Man In The Sky”, about a girl who falls in love with Orion, with its spacey synths and breathy vocal, and my favourite, “Witch and the Wizard”, with its fantastic, scorching critique of the institutions of marriage and parenthood in Hell, which as performed by avant garde pairing Jessika Kenney and Eyvind Kang comes across like a conceptual sketch in post-punk goth style for something far more metal, bringing the Connie Converse story bang up-to-date. “Witch And The Wizard” was originally in triple time (and may have owed something to Mary O’Hara’s version of “The Farmer’s Curst Wife”**), but Kang supplies a backing with a 6/8 rhythm laid over 4/4 beats, and Kenney’s triplets play against this – much the same adjustment that’s being made to Rasputina’s “Transylvanian Concubine” in Marilyn Mason’s remix, and equally as effective.***
I’ve had to, no doubt illegally, include the mp3 sound file for the Kenney and Kang cover of The Witch And The Wizard” here because, and this is typical of the respectable arts (try finding enough of Jenny McLeod’s music on YouTube), no-one involved has lowered themselves to make this album available on a streaming service for the hoi polloi. Such is life. I was introduced to Consider the Lilies in a wonderful RNZ review by William Dart, and heard the full Connie Converse story, so far as it’s known, in this fascinating series of podcasts by David Garland.
Connie’s brother Philip Converse, the political scientist, had some interesting things to say about streaming services. Really, he developed a theory of political constraint, which is the way that political attitudes fit together, or not, logically. The anti-abortionist who won’t use contraception and believes that the state should stay out of people’s private lives is an example of a low-constraint ideologist; the communist who thinks that the state should also regulate the content of non-vocal music along socialist lines, and who can’t enjoy anything “formal” or “decadent” is an example of a high constraint individual (the fact that both are egregious losers needn’t concern us here). To the high-constraint person, one value can be predicted from another – “If you like punk, you must hate Pink Floyd”. “If you question my pet social justice project, you must like Hitler”. To the low constraint person, any demand for consistency is oppressive; they have their reasons, which may even be logical in a personal, self-interested way.
“People who liked X also liked Y” – it’s an algorithm. Music listening algorithms, which are a form of targeted advertising, are probably too tightly constrained at present, which is why you need the critic, with his or her ability to make some seemingly random jump you weren’t expecting, and who even, on occasion, loves, or hates, both Pink Floyd and The Sex Pistols.
Postscript - I learned, by posting this essay on Instagram, that Howard Fishman has written a biography titled To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse, which will be available from the 2nd May 2023. If enough of you become paid subscribers, I may be able to afford my own copy.
footnotes
* Jacinda Ardern’s Labour party enjoyed unprecedented support in the 2020 New Zealand general election because Labour’s Covid response, one which included and acknowledged the unpaid efforts of the wider population, could be seen by most as an exercise in power-by-competence, yet she would resign in early 2023 after the vaccine mandates were perceived by swing voters as power-by-dominance, in favour of Chris Hipkins who was, by then, better at presenting the power-by-competence image. Which would still get you nowhere in Russia.
** Mary O’Hara’s version must exist under another title - it’s musically and lyrically different from the US version of this song first written down in 1917 and recorded by Alan Lomax later, but tells the same story. Heard it once on the radio many years ago, don’t know its name, and can’t find it now.
*** As a lyricist Converse, though usually much more personal and far less dark, does strike me sometimes as resembling Melora Creager, with a similarly Jungian method of processing life and expressing meaning, while her chord changes, when influenced by Hoagy Carmichael’s allusive bitonality, sometimes resemble Dory Previn’s.
Algorithmic nod - Dory Previn, “Lady With The Braid”.