There are so many unusual, interesting, and new things you can find – if you just look around a little bit. And libraries are all about mysteries! So, we are looking at a real-life small mystery each week and bringing some library resources to help add some clarity and some thought.

I love this story – but I wish it had an ending and an answer.

This is taken from an article on the website Priceonomics.

This is the story of the musician Connie Converse. She was a young musician, doing what young musicians do: a lot of playing for friends, family, small groups. She dropped out of college and moved to New York to be an artist. She wrote music and played it. But, as with a lot of artistic dreams, it didn’t really work out and she moved back to Michigan to be with her family and to work at other jobs. She was pretty successful – the managing editor of a journal.

And that is where a lot of artist stories end. Yes: there was fun, adventure, and exploration; but then they grow up and settle down.

That is not this story.

Connie was in New York in the 1950s. Exciting things were happening, and people were recording them. And they recorded Connie, playing and singing.

From the Priceonomics article: “Despite her professional success, depression started to eat away at Converse. Finally, in 1974, she disappeared. Her family was distraught. Ultimately, when their search efforts proved futile, and years passed without any contact from her, they decided to respect her right to disappear. Converse was a heavy drinker and smoker at the time. If she survives today she is in her early ‘90s. Her younger brother, Phil Converse, has said he suspected she took her own life back in the 1970s.

Upon her disappearance, Converse had sent letters to her friends and family and left behind notes explaining her decision. In one of them, she pleaded, “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.””

And then for most artists, that would be another very usual ending point.

But this is not that story either.

Because in 2004, Dan Dzula – a music producer – heard one of Connie’s songs on an NPR show. He waited to hear about her being signed, and becoming huge. But it never happened. Because nobody knows where Connie is, or even if she is still alive.

Dan loved her music, and ended up on an amazing adventure to bring her music to people.

“He and his professional partner David Herman began work on a record to debut their independent record label: “Squirrel Thing Recordings,” named for a line in a Connie Converse song.

Producing an absent artist is pretty different from producing a contemporary artist. First of all, with Connie Converse gone, there was nobody to record. Dzula and Herman would have to hunt down surviving recordings, and extract an album from them. It turned out that Deitch had a ton of recordings of Connie Converse, but so did Phil Converse, Connie’s younger brother. She used to mail them to him from New York. Dzula and Herman got in touch with him and acquired his recordings.

“At the time that we produced the first CD,” Dzula says, “we had found about 90 recordings of about 35 different songs.”

Now they have twice as many. The corpus expanded whenever Phil turned up a new box in his attic. Connie may have disappeared 40 years ago, but she kept churning out new material.”

This article talks about the wonderful adventures that have happened after that discovery. “Since then, Dzula, Herman and Deitch have been joined by a growing cult of Connie Converse fans. These people are independent, passionate, and many. Like a Vivian Maier of folk music, the Internet has enabled the rise of Converse’s star, even without Converse around to promote herself. Converse can be found everywhere, from Bandcamp to YouTube to streaming services like Spotify. We now live in an era of Connie Converse webcomics, crowd-funded Connie Converse documentary films, Connie Converse tribute concerts (some of them featuring Cibo Matto’s Miho Hatori), tribute songs, and blogrolls that keep rolling.”

You can find the full article here, with all the details! And you can listen to Connie: (Subscribe to Squirrel Things label on YouTube here.)

How could you bring this into a library’s program? Try a few of these ideas:

• Obviously, reading mystery or nonfiction books about people who have gone missing would be fun
• Set up a display of biographies about artists.
• Organize a discussion about how artists “make it” or don’t, and how people can define success for themselves. Talk about how success has changed for people in the age of YouTube and other self-publishing outlets.
• Round up musical instruments and/or music websites and let people work through the process of making sounds, and making music.
• Have people write about their ideas on what happened to Connie, what kinds of adventures she may have had.
• Look at material about life in the 1950s, especially life as a young woman in New York City at that time. What is different from today? What is the same?
• Listen to some of Connie’s music, and to some folk music.