In 2010, writer and musician Howard Fishman went to a Christmas party at a friend’s house where, not knowing many people, he took to scanning the bookshelves to quell his anxiety. As he did so, a song called Talkin’ Like You (Two Tall Mountains) came on the stereo that, he recalls, “swallowed me. The party froze. The room disappeared.” Set against a backdrop of gentle guitar picking, it was sung by a woman, plaintively and without affectation, about “a place they called Lonesome” where everything, from the nearby brook to the pigs in the yard, reminds her of an absent lover. Fishman sought out the host to ask who was singing, and she told him about Connie Converse, who recorded songs in her kitchen in 1950s Greenwich Village, and whose musical talents had gone largely unrecognised in her lifetime.
Fishman went straight from the party to a record store where he bought Converse’s How Sad, How Lovely, an album compiled by latterday fans in 2009. He wanted to hear more from this musician whose lyrics brimmed with poetic intimacy and whose lo-fi, homespun style sounded decades ahead of its time. Thus began a 13-year obsession, yielding a play based on Converse’s life; an album, by Fishman, of songs that Converse left behind in manuscript form; and now, in To Anyone Who Ever Asks, a rigorously researched and heartfelt biography.
