Connie Converse - How Sad, How Lovely - RARE Vinyl Record, 2015, Near Mint

$

520

"How Sad, How Lovely" by Connie Converse - 2015 pressing 
Near Mint Condition. 
Only played once - plays perfectly. No signs of wear, like new. 
Record has been kept in original packaging - cover includes protective sleeve. 
Ships carefully packaged in 3 business days of purchase via UPS Standard Mail. 

Label: Squirrel Thing Recordings – ST-002

Format: Vinyl, LP, Black Vinyl - RARE copy of Connie Converse's found recordings. 

Country: US

Released: 2015, Reissue 

Genre: Folk & Country

Tracklist: 

A1 Talkin' Like You (Two Tall Mountains)

A2 Johnny's Brother

A3 Roving Woman

A4 Down This Road

A5 The Clover Saloon

A6 John Brady

A7 We Lived Alone

A8 Playboy Of The Western World

A9 Unknown (A Little Louder, Love)

B1 One By One

B2 Father Neptune

B3 Man In The Sky

B4 Empty Pocket Waltz

B5 Honeybee

B6 There Is A Vine

B7 How Sad, How Lovely

B8 Trouble

B9 I Have Considered The Lillies

Connie Converse was the quintessential musical enigma – an artists before her time, forgotten, and disappeared without a trace over 35 years ago. If you stripped away the sharp literary mind, the precision of the songcraft, the bare honesty of her humble recordings, you would still be left with an unanswerable question: Where did she go? Why did she pack her belongings into a car, write goodbye letters to her friends and family, and vanish?

Around 1949, Elizabeth “Connie” Converse dropped out of Mt. Holyoke College and moved to New York City to make her way as a musician. Over the course of the next decade, she wrote and recorded a body of truly unique, plaintive, and haunting work. Some songs she recorded herself in her Greenwich Village apartment, others were recorded by friends enamored of her music, but almost none ever reached an audience wider than, as she once put it, “dozens of people all over the world.” By the early 1960’s, despondent over the limited commercial success of her music, she decided to leave New York for Ann Arbor where, in 1974, Connie wrote a series of goodbye letters to friends and family, packed up her Volkswagen and disappeared. She has not been heard from since.

At first listen, Connie’s music seems to keep close company with the female folk artists who were her contemporaries. The knack for plaintive storytelling shares much with Peggy Seeger and Susan Reed. Reed knew Connie’s music well, and performed a set of her songs in 1961 at the Kaufmann Concert Hall in New York. But Connie’s music stands out from that of the American folk revival of the 1950’s. Her fluid and disarmingly intelligent poetry reflects an urban perspective, that of a new New Yorker becoming disenchanted by the bucolic tropes of folk music. She is at once a maverick and a romantic, intellectual and spiritual, a staunch independent and a tender, pining lover.