The Mysterious True Story of Connie Converse

Howard Fishman, author of To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse, joins New Yorker Staff Writer Sarah Larson LIVE onstage to discuss the overlooked history of a musical pioneer.

Connie Converse was a mid-century New York City songwriter, singer, and composer whose haunting music never found broad recognition. Fishman approaches Converse’s story as both a fan and a journalist, and expertly weaves a narrative of her life and music, and of how it has come to speak to him as both an artist and a person. Ultimately, he places her in the canon as a significant outsider artist, a missing link between a now old-fashioned kind of American music and the reflective, complex, arresting music that transformed the sixties and music forever. It’s a story and subject that is by turn hopeful, inspiring, melancholy, and chilling.