I Have Considered The Lilies is a re-imagination of the music of Elizabeth “Connie” Converse - an enigmatic composer who left behind a staggering archive of music and texts after her orchestrated disappearance in 1974.
The songs you will hear throughout this album were written by Connie during the 1950s in New York. They are known as part of her “guitar song” collection, or, as she referred to it, Musicks.
The texts and poems, voiced over the improvised interludes, were taken from Connie’s letters and journal entries found in her filing cabinet. This album represents a mere fraction of Connie’s artistic work and repertoire, and provides a simple sketch of her story and personality. It was made possible due to a chain of serendipitous events that will be revealed shortly.
This album was set to be published as a vinyl and printed booklet - perhaps it will be, someday. In the meantime, this digital release will try its best to mimic that exhilarating sense of holding something tangible, or sitting with something, with someone.
So, here are some “instructions”, if you’d like:
Make some tea? Eat a clementine? Anything pleasant. Read about Connie, prepare your audio and press play. If you have the space - listen and read in one sitting, just like watching a movie. Take a moment with it, but go only as far as you’d like to. There will be (many) thanks and a few more stories at the end.
Elizabeth Converse was born in New Hampshire, on August 3rd, 1924. She was the middle child of three siblings and grew up in a puritan, god fearing religious family - her father a strict Baptist minister, her mother a housewife. She was bookish, the valedictorian of her class at Concord High School, and described by most who knew her to be a polymath, having a knack for practically everything. She attended Mt. Holyoke College on a full academic scholarship beginning in 1942, studied French, and wrote for several campus publications. After two years she decided to leave college, at which point the records of her whereabouts are sparse until about 1949, when she made her way to New York City.
She lived in a small studio apartment in the West Village, on 23 Grove St. It is unclear how or why or when exactly Elizabeth obtained the nickname “Connie”, but the name simply stuck. She worked as a freelance writer and researcher, her journals filled with updates of world-wide political affairs, social issues and cultural observations. She was published for the first time writing essays about U.S. relations in the Pacific for The Far Eastern Survey within just a few years after moving to New York. She was writing poetry, painting, drawing cartoons and teaching herself to play guitar: “Looking up chords in the back of the People’s Song book. I find I had figured most of them out by myself, without thinking about their names. But it would be a good idea for me to know their names too.” she writes. On the same neatly typed page one could find philosophical, nimble essays about various human conditions, fragments of poems, thoughts about music and composition as well as one-liners marked with a “#”. There are scarce anecdotes about her personal life, a story here and there as such:
“January 1950: My state of single cussedness grows less welcome to me in geometrical progression with the passage of days. Then I think of someone like [my friend] Libby and figure at least I’m better off than unhappily married.
Violins, a few bars from None But The Lonely Heart.
Then the affairs of my own world rush into the vacuum which nature and I abhor. We will make do, with an eye out for the main chance.”
Though she didn’t share much about her romantic life, she wrote many impeccable songs of unrequited love, often with dense, complex, and unusual (yet logically invoked) chords that, apparently, she could not name, but knew by virtue of curiosity.
Connie’s burgeoning interest in playing and writing music, first for guitar and later for piano, gradually came to the forefront of her artistic pursuit. Many of her earliest songs were poems that she had written and then set to music. She enrolled her brother Phillip and his wife Jean as members of her Song-of-the-Month Club, sending dozens of self recorded compositions made with her Crestwood 404 tape-recorder. Titled “Musicks,” these tapes included program notes, remarks and dedications such as: “These reels are strewn with minor mishaps. On the other hand, they’re not so bad.” or “Of the omissions, perhaps half a dozen [songs] have been lost in the mists of the composer’s indifference.” the tape was signed “for Phil and Jeaner Converse, with love and modest pride.”
Her music also attracted the attention of animator and amateur recordist Gene Deitch. Beginning around 1954, Connie made visits to Deitch’s home in Hastings-on-Hudson to record almost 40 songs. Over the years Deitch, along with his colleague Bill Bernal, worked to promote Connie’s music, but despite their efforts, the songs remained unheard to all but a handful of Connie’s acquaintances. As her brother Phil described, she had "dozens of fans all over the world.” The opportunities she had — the few hits, many misses, and many rejections — were scattershot, spanning over a decade: she was commissioned to write music for an educational film, Susan Reed, a pivotal figure in the NY folk scene played a set of Connie’s music at a festival and other small career victories were modestly celebrated. Through a connection made at Hastings-on-Hudson, Connie was invited to appear on CBS’s “Morning Show.” She, as well as her family and supporters, were sure that this would be her “big break” after years of trying to establish herself as a musician. The day came, she arrived to the studio, performed her songs and nothing happened. Her songs were misplaced, unsuited and unconventional for the time. Despite her lack of recognition she continued to write prolifically. She moved to Harlem, where she got herself a piano, and began to explore different kinds of compositions - a song cycle about Cassandra's myth, an attempt at a short opera called “The Prodigal Nephew,” arias, piano works and more.
In 1961 Connie tired of New York. Her musical and literary ambitions were never given a real chance and she had no evident romantic prospects. She left for Ann Arbor where her brother Phil worked as a professor at the University of Michigan, to start anew, closer to her family. Having dropped out of college seventeen years prior, it came as something of a surprise that, within months of her arrival in Ann Arbor, Connie had implanted herself firmly in the academic community of U-Mich. She began as a secretary at the Center for Research on Conflict Resolution, eventually working her way to Managing Editor and Co-Editor of CRCR’s Journal of Conflict Resolution. She volunteered as a political activist, worked on a novel, and tried to raise funds for the possibility of converting an old Hotel into a record store/community performance space in Ann Arbor. Nothing panned out.
Between 1967-1971 She took a series of demanding jobs that after a while took a toll on her, physically and mentally, eventually leading to a breakdown. She called it her “Box of Blue Funk and Dilemma.” In 1971, she requested an extended leave of absence from CRCR, citing what she saw as her poor performance at work and unspecified medical problems. Her employer responded by organizing a group of Connie’s friends and colleagues to contribute to a pool of money that would allow her to take a six-month sabbatical in England, which she would later describe as one of the only times in her life that she allowed herself to enjoy “unproductive fun.”
As shown in her “Blue Funk” letter, which you can hear as the track “The Screaming Meemies”, she battled depression and anxiety at a time when mental illness was taboo. She never married or had any children. Her romantic life, in fact, remained and still remains a mystery - her family and friends never heard of any relationships she ever had, nor did her journals or photo albums seem to reveal anything tangible. Her songs and writings which provided clear examples of auto-biographical material, were written with such intimacy, and with a strange dichotomy of vulnerability and aloofness. She sang of isolation, of her romantic ventures, and her enamore with various lovers. It leaves us questioning: who was she singing of?
In August of 1974, a week after her 50th birthday and after waiting for the resignation of Richard Nixon, Connie wrote a series of farewell letters to friends and family. With her letter to Philip, her brother, Connie included a check, and instructed that he make sure that her health insurance was paid until a certain date, then requested he cease the policy payment. She packed up her Volkswagen Beetle and disappeared. Her whereabouts are unknown to this day.
epilogue
It has been quite a while since I began mulling over Connie’s works and all the various questions her story had posed for me, as well as all the different answers I came up with. It has been a while since I escaped through the walls of my own box of Blue Funk and Dilemma(s), or perhaps I still reside there and the walls just keep changing their colors and substance. It has not been that much of a while since all of our individually peculiar boxes were thrust into space and crossed the atmosphere to float in slow-motion dancing in chaotic unison of uncertainty till further notice - - the Empty Pocket Waltz? - It sure does pair well together. A curious situation has arisen which merits, I think, a word or two. Taking all of that into consideration while having a hasty, yet firm deadline, and being well aware that my writing is not close to be as adequate or perceptive as Connie’s - I will take the liberty to employ her words one last time.
This is an excerpt from her letter called “Report on a Bridge Built Over Troubled Waters (and other metaphors),” that she posted to the members of the committee who organized for her sabbatical, as mentioned above in her bio. By this point in the letter, she has already described the nature of her Blue Funk walls and her dilemmas concerning money, she continues describing a fairytale-like entrance from her boss at the time Mr. Barth, and writes the chronicles of sitting at her desk, unexpectedly receiving help against all those huge odds, in the form of a check and its respective letters. Now you’re up to date:
“Well, once I have examined all the nineteen pieces of paper and been patted kindly on the back several times by Mr. Barth, I knew I didn’t have the faintest intention of tearing up the check. I thought to myself, this is not an investment in my future - - who knows who has a future?? - - it is an investment in my present. It is like all the women during the 1930s who always fed all the tramps who always came to their back doors. I was a tramp once myself in Pennsylvania and we came to the back door of a farmhouse and asked for a glass of water, and the lady drug us into her kitchen and sat us down at a big table and laid out platters of ham and beef and chicken and several salads and an embarrassment of vegetables and we ate for an hour, and we talked with her for hours about who we were and who she was and how we all felt about all sorts of things. Although she was obviously prosperous and we were nearly broke, I don’t think the transaction had anything to do with business or politics or charity.
(In fact I think it’s the exact opposite of the Abbie Hoffman rip-off, which doesn’t really have anything to do with business or politics or charity either, though he seems to think it does. My exact opposite model has to do with people enjoying each other for a tiny while despite the terrible long-term differences in their conditions and apparent qualities and fates.)
Upon these grounds, therefore, having been brought hungry and blindfolded to your back doors, I am going to chomp away merrily on your feast. Or, returning to my first metaphor, what you have done with your contributions is to turn my Blue Funk and Dilemma box over its side so that I can escape through the floor.
If I think hard about it I feel undeserving, so I refuse to think hard about it. What makes me cry is knowing for a certainty that all of you have been emotionally or economically broke at one or many times in your lives (that ought to be one of the first ten axioms of social science) and I wish I was a member of your committee in such an elegant way and at such proper moment.“
And a very proper (and inelegant) moment it was, when, before I had ever heard of the name ‘Connie Converse’, as I was glooming horizontally on the floors of my box wishing to snap two fingers and *poof* away - I randomly stumbled across Connie’s Two Tall Mountains. I’d never heard anything like it, yet in the same breath I could say that it felt extremely, uncannily familiar. It was the first rapturous break of sun through the long-accumulating dark clouds of my desolation. The more I devoured her songs and texts the more light continued to pour in. I felt seen and held by her words and was in complete euphoria of how astoundingly beautiful music can be, how a story could convey landscapes and weather, altering our perception and emotions instantly - something that was difficult for me to remember at a time when I was attached to, and suffering from, the idea that I could never be able to create such notions for other people as an artist, or person.
The entirety of this endeavour, as well as the contributions made by all the people who took part in the making of this project, slowly turned my box over on its side allowing me to escape through the floor falling right into a hug. They, as well as the people whole came up to me after our shows, merged my troubles and theirs into the fabric. If I think hard about it I feel undeserving, so I refuse to think hard about it. I felt compelled to bestow Connie’s myth upon the ears of anyone who would listen. Through her I slowly learned to handle my own conditions, eventually finding in myself, (sometimes forcing) enough bravery to practice vulnerability, to be able to speak of these experiences out loud and in front of many strangers - hoping to remind myself and others of the comforts to be taken in that initial axiom of social science and to realize, again and again, how human these conditions were to begin with.
The very positive aspect of our mutually enforced fermata, is that it unprecedentedly reveals the opportunity, as well as the crippling amount of time, to rethink the confinements of various boxes - - redecorating the walls, maybe hanging a new, perhaps surprisingly off-brand painting, or sorting through belongings rediscovering their beauty, to learn and unlearn, to try again, slowly building hatches and back doors and swinging gates so we could eventually come and go as we please, to invite each other in (figuratively, unfortunately, at the moment), or just reach out our hands through the openings to help tilt someone else’s box on its side and escape through the floor.
We have the time to set up a big table, to prepare for a feast. We’ll be chomping away merrily on the fare offered to us, talking for hours about who we are and how we all feel about all sorts of things, with no regards to transactions, business, politics or charity (unless it’s about taking on a more sustainable model.) Let’s lick fingers and wipe the sauce off chins and If we ever were to go back to wearing real pants - let’s pop open a button, enjoying each other for a tiny while, despite the differences. By keeping our doors closed, we are preventing ourselves from so much beauty. All these spreads ! All these stories ! There must be such an array of tales and art, so many stories lost, twisted, erased, stolen, forbidden, or ones that simply flew right by with no one to notice. And people, that were lost or have disappeared just like Connie - that were kept walking in the dark, I believe, not just for the various doors shut in their faces, but for the sociatable prenotion, that one should not scream audibly or stamp their foot down or show any fragment of “instability”. Aren’t narratives, art, culture and its diversity the sort of things that we pride on, that we consider to be most precious in human society? Which stories have replaced all the ones that were washed away? What makes a story, an idea, “important”? When does an artist becomes an “artist”? Which stories are we choosing to tell, to believe in, to hold onto? And are they beneficial for us? To others?
As an alternative, I would accept if someone were to make teleportation a thing (mainly, since it’s my personal choice of super powers) making disappearing nonchalant, with the ability to come back whenever you’d like to without a single eyebrow raised. But I don’t think that’s very likely to happen any time soon, so, let's consider some lilies - and if you know how to be a lily - please let me know.
a tidy sum for postmortem publication
Connie’s songs were carefully and lovingly restored by Daniel Dzula & David Herman at Squirrel Thing Recordings and released on the album “How Sad, How Lovely” in 2009. A few years before , Dzula was sitting in his car and came across the WYNC radio show “Spinning on Air,” hosted by David Garland. Gene Deitch was the guest and had mentioned Connie, playing one of his old home recordings of her. Dzula was profoundly moved by Connie’s performance and eagerly waited to learn more about her, assuming someone would further investigate who she was and release more of her music. After a few years of silence, he decided to do so himself. Dzula is now preparing a box set of Connie’s complete recordings and works. Howard Fishman, a musician and writer who heard “How Sad, How Lovely,” became infatuated with Connie’s music and and started interviewing her family members and friends and producing an album out of her unrecorded manuscripts. He is now working on a full-length biography of hers.
Connie’s story is a tale that was confined to be sitting in the dark. The story of how Connie’s music came to public life today is one in which, by some stroke of luck, her music managed to land upon the ears of a handful of individuals who felt a sense of duty to save something of great importance, something which was in danger of being washed away. Individuals who found themselves mesmerized, diving into Lonesome Lake with great urgency and tenacity almost 50 years after she vanished, trying and bring her back to surface.
Notes from Phillip Converse, Gene Deitch and Dan Dzula, written on the occasion of the first release of Connie’s recordings on the album “How Sad How Lovely” in 2009:
A note from Connie’s brother, Philip Converse:
“I have often thought that the greatest fortune of my life was to be born 39 months after my sister Elizabeth, also known in New York City in early adulthood as “Connie,” since she disliked the name or any derivatives like “Betty” or “Liz”. To me she was just “Sis,” and of course at the time I had no idea other little boys weren’t a tenth as lucky. For she doted on me, and in a real sense raised me into her very exciting world. It was exciting because she was endlessly creative. Our parents were fine, and the family was both literate and musical. But even with these family resources, Sis was just something else.
She enlisted me in endless fun and games, but also did all sorts of things I could not imagine doing. She turned out cartoon strips that I thought were better than the ones in the newspaper. She took house paint to our sewing-room wall to show Robin Hood and Maid Marian in Sherwood Forest, 6’ by 4’ large. She was probably not over 12 when she did a plasticine sculpture of Columbus looking westward from a dock, put on display in our city library for Columbus Day. And to our family’s surprise, there was a lengthy poem about Lincoln written by Sis that turned up in the city paper for Lincoln’s birthday, obviously submitted by an admiring middle school teacher. Needless to say, I just tagged along admiring her works, and smitten by the games we played together. Years later, our mother commented that she felt blessed because neither of us ever came to her whining,“What can we do now?” For us, there were never enough hours in the day!
Sis was valedictorian of her high school class of 150 schoolmates, sweeping most of the other senior honors as well. She won the top scholarship to Mount Holyoke, which her mother and grandmother had also attended. After a year or two in harness there, however, she decided to kick over the traces and head to New York City to seek her fortune. It was there about 1950 that she began to compose her folk-style songs with guitar accompaniment, mailing us in Michigan a new recording nearly every month for several years. Her lyrics were amazingly clever, and the melodies highly infectious. She also set to music some of her favorite poems, by Shakespeare, Housman, e.e. cummings, Jacques Prévert, Dylan Thomas and the like. About 1956 she managed to wedge a piano into her tiny apartment, and began a new series of songs to piano accompaniment. These tend to be closer to art songs than folk style, with a somewhat higher rate of music set to others’ poems. These are all preserved in manuscript form, which I hope to get produced soon as Musicks Vol. 2.
After Sis decided to disappear in 1974, I could not bear the thought that this splendid corpus of song might totally disappear from human ken. Wherever she had gone, small cults had sprung up loving what they knew of her music and hungry for more. This enthusiasm was, moreover, cross-generational: in recent years I have been surprised to be tracked down not only by parents of the 1950s, but also by their kids themselves, who had grown up with this music, and yearned to hear it again. Happily, a few years back I found Gene Deitch with the same obsession to preserve, and able to supply more nearly studio-quality recordings. We are now most grateful to Dan Dzula and David Herman for their restoration marvels, and their publicizing of Connie’s wondrous legacy.
To Sis, who made us Charter Members of the Song-of-the-Month Club.
- Philip Converse, Ann Arbor, January 2009”
A note from Connie’s friend, Gene Deitch:
Bill Bernal, my best friend from my earliest adult years – and I’m talking about 1946, when I first met him – was the most exuberantly enthusiastic person I ever knew – a screenwriter – and a constant discoverer and promoter of new talent. He discovered me! He led me to my first job in animation in my early Hollywood days. He always knew the greatest new books, movies, records – ideas. We became close friends and colleagues, and worked together on many projects, some which involved my passion for home recording. I always had the latest reel-to-reel tape recorders. Thus he brought me his latest discovery in 1955. She was a prim-looking school-teacher-ish young woman with the euphonious name, Connie Converse. Elizabeth actually, but she was “Connie” because she had come from Concord. “You must record her!” exclaimed Bill. I did, and I fell under her amazing spell. Her songs were indeed spellbinding, the likes of which none of us had heard before. She was an original; a highly literate, highly musical, perhaps emotionally repressed person whose every personal song seemed to be telling one or another aspect of her own inner life, which immediately struck me as one of mystery and magic. It was the magic of creation.
She was obviously so intelligent, so brilliant, and at the same time so mysterious, this angel of evocative song, who had suddenly descended into our 9 Ronnie Circle house in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, that all of us, we and guests invited to hear her, were eager to know more about her. I began to ask her questions while my tape recorder was running, but I found I was sounding like one of those idiot talk show interviewers, and my questions sound stupid when I hear them now. She was gracious enough, but her little nervous laughs at my questions, just made me realize it was better to back off and just allow her to tell her story in song. I felt that the essence of her life, her implied unrequited loves, disappointments and resultant irony, were all there between the wondrously constructed lines of her songs.
Perhaps other singers of the sort have come along, many perhaps better singers, but Connie’s poignant imagery forgives all wavers. She was surely one of the first to have created such a vast canon of lovely, melodic, pure, funny, ironic, and also heartbreaking personal songs. She was way ahead of her time, at least 50 years ahead our present time. Her songs from the 1950s haunt me still. My great friend Bill Bernal tirelessly attempted to promote Connie until his dying day. I attempted to carry on, and played my old Connie tapes for whomever I hoped might share Bill’s and my belief that her great songs deserved a life. One such chance came when I was invited to play my favorite records on Dave Garland’s WNYC Spinning on Air radio show. By the merest chance, an “angel” happened to hear the show, and was struck by Connie’s haunting song, One By One. That song haunted him for three years before he decided to call me. He was Dan Dzula, and the result is the amazingly restored disc you hold in your hand. If I am asked here to give my personal description of Connie Converse, I would simply state the title of another of her songs, and of this long, long, long awaited album: how sad, how lovely.
- Gene Deitch, Prague January 2009
A note from Dan Dazula, the producer of “How Sad How Lovely”:
David Garland’s 2004 Spinning On Air broadcast with the venerable animator Gene Deitch never quite left my mind. After hearing it only once, Connie’s One by One haunted me for years! Late in 2007, after countless dead-ends, three years of fruitless simple research, and the realization that Connie was at risk of being lost in the shuffle of time (and my own fading memory) I finally decided to contact Gene Deitch, hoping that he might share one or two of Connie’s other songs. Or better still, perhaps he would allow me to help produce an album. A genuine offer, but a long-shot, I thought.
I certainly never expected to hear back from him within two hours of sending the email; the man lives in Prague! Gene pounced with an eager reply. As it turns out, sharing Connie’s work and producing an album of her material had been one of his life’s “greatest most unrequited dreams.” And as his website reveals, here is a man who has dreamed – and accomplished – a heck of a lot in eighty years.
With the prospect of a real record coming out of these Connie tapes, and mountains of research/logistics ahead of me, I enlisted the help of my best friend, David Herman, whose help and guidance quickly proved indispensable.
Gene digitized his tapes and put us in touch with Connie’s brother Phil in Ann Arbor, who sent two more reels of tape. The songs on Phil’s reels had been recorded by Connie herself and comprised a collection that she referred to as Musicks, Vol. 1 (implying that Vol. 2 was in the works?). It was this homemade compilation that Phil had shared with a handful of people over the years (accompanied by an elegant pamphlet with biographical details, lyrics, and notes) in hopes that Connie might garner a few more than her “dozens of fans around the world.”
In September 2008, we visited Phil Converse and his wife Jean at their home in Ann Arbor. In their infinite graciousness they allowed two strangers from New York to weed through the garage where Phil keeps Connie’s old filing cabinet, meticulously ordered in numbered folders and indexed in a table of contents, so as to make clear precisely which poems, letters, tapes, photos, and slides could be found, and where. It was also clear which records had been intentionally “dumped.” As if she had expected us – someone – to come looking. Connie had practically done our work for us, more than thirty years prior to our arrival, and she was careful which parts of the mystery she would prefer to remain as such. But there were certainly treasures in that filing cabinet: a cartoon score she wrote for the National Allergy Foundation, a tape of Susan Reed singing two of Connie’s songs, and a 16mm theatrical print of a short film based on a lush arrangement of Connie’s Playboy of the Western World, all in stark contrast to Connie’s haunting, melancholy solo recordings.
Despite what we now know about Connie and her work – and despite her family’s contentment – we cannot gauge whether or not she would actually approve of this project. She might blush and say something like “You know, these were only my demos.” Or perhaps, more to the enterprising side of her nature, “Why don’t we record them now, for real?”
-Daniel Dzula, New York, February 2009
