Skip to main content
WOKE-1tune in
Elizabeth Converse

Elizabeth Converse

Vanity of Vanities (Original Recording)

The vanished folk pioneer whose homemade tapes outlasted her disappearance, proving she wrote circles around Dylan before Dylan existed.

APPLE MUSIC

Vanity of Vanities (Original Recording)

Elizabeth Converse

About

MOODS · haunting · intimate · melancholic · literary · understated · wistful · spare · confessional · enigmatic · vintage folk · tender · mysterious

BIOGRAPHY

Elizabeth Eaton Converse, known as Connie Converse, was born in 1924 in Laconia, New Hampshire, and raised in Concord, where she was valedictorian of her high school. She moved to New York City to pursue music and writing, performing self-penned solo songs with guitar at a time when such personal songwriting was unusual, even appearing on CBS's The Morning Show in 1954. She never landed a recording contract, and her songs survive only through home recordings made by friends. After about a decade in New York, she moved to Ann Arbor, working at the University of Michigan and eventually becoming managing editor of The Journal of Conflict Resolution by 1964. In 1974 she packed her Volkswagen Beetle and drove away, never to be heard from again.

WHY THEY'RE COOL

Converse was writing intimate, literary singer-songwriter material years before the folk revival gave that approach a name, predating Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen entirely. Utterly obscure in her lifetime, her work resurfaced in 2004 when Gene Deitch played his 1950s home recordings of her on WNYC, leading to the 2009 release How Sad, How Lovely. Since then her songs have been covered by Karen O, Mike Patton, and Laurie Anderson, with Julia Bullock winning a Grammy for a performance of "One by One" and John Zorn recording a tribute album in 2017. Folk scholar Ellen Stekert told The New York Times she was "even better than Dylan as a lyricist and composer."

ON WOKE-1

First play on WOKE-1.