L to R: The book cover for To Anyone Who Ever Asks, and a picture of the author, Howard Fishman
We are in the midst of a golden age of mid-century popular music, with expanded deluxe editions, lost albums, compilations, rediscovery, and reexamination. Enter Connie Converse.
Converse is redefining the narrative of singer-songwriter history, bridging the gap between traditional Americana (country, blues, folk, jazz, and gospel), the Great American Songbook, classical art song, and the singer-songwriter movement spurred on by Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell—but Converse was doing it a decade before those figures arrived.
This revelatory subject is the focus of the inaugural Verso Book Club event, which welcomes author Howard Fishman, writer of the widely shared New York Times feature Before Dylan, There Was Connie Converse. Then She Vanished., and the critically acclaimed book, To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse.
The event is free and will take place at The Westport Library on Thursday, October 5, 7-9 pm, in Brooks Place (on the Library's main level). Registration is required.
Copies of To Anyone Who Ever Asks can be purchased through registration and at the event, where Fishman will be signing copies. The book is also available in The Westport Library catalog.
"Connie Converse was the ultimate cross-disciplinary innovator," said Fishman, "so I'm thrilled to be able to present a talk about her at a forward-thinking venue like The Westport Library/Verso Studios."
“With Verso Studios' vision to marry literature, music, and media, we welcome this inaugural Verso Book Club event as a forum for tri-state area writers and fans to see how writing and investigative journalism elevates and defines art," Westport Library Executive Director Bill Harmer said.
In the wave of reappraisal in Converse’s work, there are now more than 10 million streams and 80,000 monthly listeners of Converse’s songs on Spotify. Artists ranging from Jeff Tweedy (Wilco) and Big Thief to opera’s rising star Julia Bullock have covered her work.
To Anyone Who Ever Asks press release reads, “Fishman recounts what can be known about Converse’s life while offering readers insight into her work and why it was so far ahead of her time. The bizarre legend about Connie Converse that had become the prevailing narrative among those who had also discovered her music was that in 1974, at the age of fifty, she simply drove off one day and was never heard from again. Could this have been true? A dozen years of research, travel to the places she lived, immersion into the voluminous effects she left behind, and hundreds of interviews later (including many with her friends and family members), Fishman gives readers a compelling book.”
The Verso Book Club is a reading group engaging in discourse and discussion on new and classic books focusing on contemporary popular music, media, and culture, filmmaking, and artistic scenes. The Verso Book Club provides a forum for author talks on influence, craft, process, and approach. Author talks are recorded, archived, and promoted via the state-of-the-art Verso Studios.
Fishman is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, where he has published essays on music, film, theater, literature, travel, and culture. His essays have also appeared in Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, Artforum, San Francisco Chronicle, Mojo, The Village Voice, Jazziz, and Salmagundi. His play, A Star Has Burnt My Eye, was a New York Times “Critics Pick.”
As a performing songwriter and bandleader, Fishman has toured internationally as a headlining artist for more than two decades. He has released 11 albums to date, and is the producer of the album, Connie's Piano Songs: The Art Songs of Elizabeth "Connie" Converse.
