Sort of a Squirrel Thing
Matthew Patzner
A tape recorder whirs, and a man’s voice bursts through the static: “How about ‘Two Tall Mountains’?”
A meek voice hums in acknowledgement. The frail sound of a chord, quickly strung. A deep inhale, and that meek voice soars into an eerie refrain.
In between two tall mountains, there’s a place they call Lonesome.
Don’t see why they call it Lonesome,
I’m never lonesome when I go there.
Her whistling ghostliness is quickly curtailed by the pleasant strumming of a guitar. The singer, embodying a newfound confidence to match the musical shift, gets a whole lot cheerier.
See that bird sittin’ on my windowsill?
Well, he’s sayin’ whippoorwill all the night through
See that brook runnin’ by my kitchen door?
Well, it couldn’t talk no more if it was you.
Her lilting voice, in all its little ebbs and flows, conveys a charming self-assuredness, both lovelorn and fiercely empowered all at once. This delivery, along with the wit and originality of the song’s lyrics, strips this particular breakup song of all the genre’s typical cliches.
Up that tree, there’s sort of a squirrel thing.
Sounds just like we did when we were quarreling.
In the yard, I keep a pig or two.
They drop in for dinner like you used to do.
Obviously turning her nose up at the subject of this little ditty, the singer asserts that she doesn't need anybody in her little old place called “Lonesome.” If her lover won’t speak to her, don’t worry about it; the birds, pigs, and squirrels will. In short, she has all the company she needs, thank you very much! While this is a fairly common theme in songs released today (“Flowers,” anyone?), in the early 1950s, this subtle defiance was a radical manifesto. Not to mention the fact that it’s a total earworm.
I don’t stand in the need of company
With everything I see, talkin’ like you.
“Talkin’ Like You (Two Tall Mountains)” is the most well-known song by Elizabeth “Connie” Converse. But, make no mistake, being the most well-known song by Connie Converse is, heartbreakingly, like the phrase jumbo shrimp: it’s an oxymoron.
Fleeing the puritanical rigidity of mid-century Massachusetts, Converse, after a brief stint at Mount Holyoke, settled in New York City. By 1954, crammed in a small, one-room apartment in Greenwich Village, she began writing songs. A few took notice, and Converse began to perform at house parties across the city. But she was not a conventional performer. More a librarian than a glamour girl, friend Barbara Bernal remembered that Connie “dressed rather shabbily, like she had just milked the cows.” Some have even claimed that she would drop crushed nutmeg down her blouse in order to purposefully repulse the people around her.
Throughout the decade, a couple of small-time cabaret singers incorporated her songs into their acts, and Connie herself even got a slot on a popular morning show. But by 1961, she packed up her things and left the Big Apple for good, with little to show for it except the home recordings she and her friends had made of her music. That music, dissonant to anything in the ‘50s musical mainstream, just couldn’t find a place for itself, even in the Village’s bohemian folk scene.
And so, Converse settled into a life in academia in Ann Arbor, Michigan. But intense melancholia colored the remainder of her life, and in 1974, she wrote a series of cryptic goodbye notes to her family. “Human society fascinates me and awes me and fills me with grief and joy,” she wrote, “I just can't find my place to plug into it.” Of her relatives, she begged: “Let me go, let me be if I can, let me not be if I can't.” It seemed her wish to bloom, whether that be artistically or merely in life, a need expressed so vulnerably in “I Have Considered the Lilies,” went unfulfilled:
To be more splendid than Solomon
I'll walk around wearing the morning sun.
The sun by day
The moon by night
And blooming would be my delight.
Just like that, she disappeared. In the fifty-two years since she drove away in her Volkswagen, nobody has seen or heard from Connie Converse.
But in the early 2000s, those home-recordings of her music got into the hands of music historian David Garland, who played a few selections on his WNYC program, Spinning on Air. From there, a CD was released, and in the years since, Converse has developed a cult following. Her current popularity, in a culture obsessed with true crime, is no doubt at least somewhat fueled by the mystery of her disappearance. A sort of hipster Jimmy Hoffa, if you will. But her music, too, has captivated a particular sect of listeners. She was writing songs like Dylan before Dylan, singing like Baez (though a little less polished) before Baez. But even these comparisons somehow fall short. Neither fish nor fowl, Converse is staunchly intellectual yet oddly romantic, having made music that defies all classifications: musical poetry, more than anything else. It’s only natural, I suppose, that her music would finally find its niche during the post-mortem period of the greater monoculture, when eclectics, like Converse, generally have a much easier time finding their audiences. But this ending, though triumphant in a way, is certainly bittersweet. To quote the title of another one of her songs: “How Sad, How Lovely.” It's nice, for sure, but it reminds you, nevertheless, of a sad truth.
In Converse’s music, you can hear the unmade art and unrealized potential not just of extraordinary artists, but of extraordinary female artists, who have historically had their work pushed to the margins. In Connie’s deceptively simple guitar songs, you can hear Julia Ward Howe’s novel The Hermaphrodite, a revolutionary novel of gender fluidity that was shoved in a drawer for over a hundred years. You can hear the voice of Florence Ballard, who was unceremoniously and unjustly fired from the popular singing group The Supremes in the late ‘60s, passing away a few years later before she was able to reestablish herself as a solo artist. They, like Connie Converse, walked alone, in the dark, waiting for a more enlightened world to uncover their stories and their gifts. “One by One,” one of Converse’s most haunting lyrics, speaks to this great injustice.
We go walking in the dark.
We go walking out at night.
And it’s not as lovers go two by two, to and fro
But it’s one by one
One by one in the dark
How fitting that it was the first song of hers to be “discovered” back in 2004.
We go walking out at night
As we wander through the grass
We can hear each other pass
But we’re far apart
Far apart in the dark
These artists wander separately, ignored and forgotten, disappearing in all their “unmarketability” into the darkness, far apart from the personified concept of mainstream success.
We go walking out at night
With the grass so dark and tall
We are lost, past recall.
If the moon is down
And the moon is down.
With support, they could have reached grand heights. But as it stands, they’re left behind. In the grass, so dark and all, they are lost, past recall.
We are walking in the dark.
If I had your hand in mine
I could shine
I could shine like the morning sun
Like the sun.
I first encountered Connie Converse during a long, hot, difficult summer. A horrible time was had by all, but Converse’s music was a spark in the embers. As I look back now, while there’s still a lot of that horribleness lingering on, of course, some of my most vivid memories of that time are wandering down long, grassy paths and getting completely lost in her voice and words. I sincerely hope that those who are unfamiliar with her oeuvre can find her during similar times of woe and have that same experience.
To start, go to the album How Sad, How Lovely. It’s all there, really. And if you find yourself as entranced as I was and want to learn more, find a copy of Howard Fishman’s To Anyone Who Ever Asks (from which most of this piece is cannibalized).
And then, if you really want to honor her, keep on walking in the dark, and remember to give the incredible talents that burn bright all around us their flowers while they’re still here to receive them.
Learn from past mistakes. Learn from Connie Converse.