If I had your hand in mine, I could shine
Human society fascinates me and awes me and fills me with grief and joy
“This I did about three o’clock one morning,” Connie Converse says, “about a month ago or six weeks.” It’s all the background she’s willing to give. It’s clear from surviving recordings that she wasn’t much for banter, preferring instead to let the songs speak for themselves. Though convincing her to perform, it seemed, was similarly difficult.
Reflecting on the impromptu session half-a-century after he recorded it, Gene Deitch described the musician’s reluctance to grab a guitar and perform at his creative salon. Still a year from an apprenticeship at United Productions of America that would mark the beginnings of a long, award-winning animation career, Deitch was music fan, turned amateur audio engineer.
Converse’s general demeanor was aloof, with little interesting the attending crowd. One member of the audience rather unflatteringly described her as, “like she had just come in from milking the cows.” Coaxed into picking up her guitar, she begins, “We go walking in the dark / We go walking out at night.” Her self-taught fingerpicking style accompanies a voice that is at once gentle and powerful, hovering and quavering an octave or two above her speaking voice.
By the second stanza, the romance has faded, giving way to something more melancholy. “And it's not as lovers go, two by two, to and fro,” her voice sails even higher, “But it's one by one.” The song’s characters continue walking, through tall grass, alone in the night. They can hear one another but are too far apart to connect. “If I had your hand in mine I could shine,” she sings in the final verse. “I could shine Like the morning sun.”
The performance impressed the party attendees enough that Deitch helped land Converse and appearance on CBS’s Morning Show. No footage of the appearance survives — as was the custom of much live television of the era. A few stills remain, with Converse seated behind an acoustic guitar. In one, host Walter Cronkite is smiling, one elbow learning against her instrument.
Nothing much came of Converse’s only known television appearance, and the musician grew increasingly frustrated. “Being a complex and inward personality, I have always found it difficult to make myself known,” she wrote her brother. “I generally conceal my own problems and listen attentively to those of others.”
In 1961, she moved from the burgeoning Greenwich Village folk scene, just as figures like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez were making names for themselves. She settled uptown in Harlem, landing in an apartment with a piano she would use to compose a cycle of songs. A brilliant polymath, who’d dropped out of college in her sophomore year to pursue a life of music in the Big Apple, Converse left New York for Ann Arbor, where her brother worked as a University Professor.
She abandoned her musical dreams, working instead as editor at International Conflict Resolution, a peer-reviewed academic journal, for nearly a dozen years. In a draft of letter to her brother dated a week after her 50th birthday, she speaks clinically about the underpinnings of middle-age depression.
“Human society fascinates me and awes me and fills me with grief and joy,” she writes. “I just can’t find my place to plug into it. So let me go, please; and please accept my thanks for those happy times that each of you has given me over the years; and please know that I would have preferred to give you more than I ever did or could — I am in everyone’s debt.”
Converse packed her belongings into her Volkswagen Beetle and drove.
Sources:
Connie Converse: The mystery of the original singer-songwriter https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-29258982
Connie Converse’s Time Has Come https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/connie-converses-time-has-come
The musical mystery of Connie Converse https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/The-musical-mystery-of-Connie-Converse-3248530.php