If you were listening to 'Back to Mine' this week, you may have heard Nina Persson talking about singer Connie Converse.

Connie was born Elizabeth Eaton Converse in New Hampshire in 1924.  She was the middle child in a Baptist family and her father was a Baptist minister.  She moved to New York in the early 1950's, started calling herself 'Connie' and began to write and perform songs for friends.  

Her music came to the attention of an animator and amateur recording engineer Gene Deitch. Deitch made some tape recordings of Connie in the kitchen of his house in the mid-1950s but she failed to attract any commercial interest. Her only public performance was a brief television appearance in 1954 on "The Morning Show" on CBS with Walter Cronkite, which Deitch helped to arrange.

In 1961 Connie left New York and moved to Ann Arbor Michigan where she took up a job at the university there and continued to play music in her spare time.

On day in August 1974, Connie wrote a series of goodbye letters to her family and friends, drove off in her Volkswagen and was never seen again.

Andrea Kannes is a film-maker who is currently making a film about Connie called 'We Lived Alone : The Connie Converse Documentary'. Tim Converse is one of Connie's nephews.  They told Tom the fascinating story of this forgotten singer.

You can listen to the interview here.

 

Originally published 15/1/2014