Playboy of the Western World 1953

Listen to Playboy of the Western World

I want to live in this world with my heart unfurled. I want to be elegant past all dreaming. I want to be a hero in a world that doesn’t want me to be. And I will not give up the fight.

Such was the essence of 29-year-old Elizabeth Eaton Converse, underground songwriter, composer, poet, sculptor, painter, journalist. Self-proclaimed roving woman. Pioneer of a folk music that was tragically ahead of her time. By the time she had started writing these songs, she had moved from her strict Baptist home in Concord, New Hampshire, to the bustling artistic hub of New York City. And from the beginning of this pivotal move, she had a new name, Connie. Not an alter-ego, nor a new identity, but simply a reclamation of her full, unapologetic self.

In keeping with her unflinching embrace of the daring and controversial, Connie wrote Playboy of the Western World after by J.M. Synge’s riot-inducing play, which chronicles the life of a devilish young man who brags about having killed his father. Despite his malevolence, the playboy receives hero, or anti-hero, status, growing his popularity. For all his charm, he can make anyone fall in love with him – and the world around him – no matter what his crime.

Connie’s version of the playboy has none of the malice but still all the blind, confident ability to make every mundane moment shimmer with excitement. Perhaps Connie is asking us to dare to become the playboys of our own worlds? What if we could really believe in ourselves, going about our lives with total confidence and unbridled ambition, charming ourselves and each other, no matter the trying world around us? What if we could go around with our hearts unfurled, and never give up on all the joyous possibilities of life?

Alas, as with all adult fairytales, the fantasy has an equal shortfall. “Playboys die young; this one did too. All worn out making dreams come true.” It’s the tragic idea that the brightest flames burn the quickest; that “nothing gold can stay”, and that all that is fantastical is only an escape. After all our chivalry and dreaming, we are forced to rest and retreat into more mundane realities.

Playboy of the Western World

Words and Music by Elizabeth (Connie) Converse

I knew a man once
Very long ago
They say that he was born in Buffalo
But I don't believe it
Buffalo was never sufficiently gilded and pearled
And this man turned out to be
The playboy of the western world

Oh, he was elegant past all dreaming
He made seeming seem like the real McCoy
All the sheiks of Araby, all the shahs of Persia
Couldn’t hold a candle to this boy

When he walked through a room
It looked as handsome as Napoleon’s tomb
And the Ford he rode
Could have been Mercedes-Benz à la mode

When he took me out I didn’t doubt
That we were going to the Astor or the Sherry-Netherland
Spring seemed to linger
In the little bunch of flowers he pressed into my hand

Little bunch of flowers, didn’t cost a dime
Picked them in the park in their prime

He went around with his heart unfurled
The one and only playboy of the western world
You could fall in love with everyone you’d meet
When you walked with him down the street

Playboys die young, this one did too
All worn out making dreams come true

And the world was grim again, without him again
Without him

For he was, elegant past all dreaming
He made seeming seem like the real McCoy
All the sheiks of Araby, all the shahs of Persia
Couldn’t hold a candle to this boy

When they took him out, oh, I didn’t doubt
That we were going, he was going to Miami or some other wonderland
Spring seemed to linger
In the little bunch of flowers I pressed into his hand

Little bunch of flowers, didn’t cost a dime
Picked them in the park, in their prime

He went around with his heart unfurled
The one and only playboy of the western world
He was the playboy of the western world
The playboy of the western world

I Have Considered The Lilies 1954

Listen to I Have Considered the Lilies

Honeybee 1951

Listen to Honeybee

It is in these next two songs that Connie explores these ideas, by appealing to nature and imagination as a vessel for our everyday human struggles. Instead of our daily stresses and toils, Connie muses: Wouldn’t we like to be lilies sometimes? To lilt in cool ponds and sway in whatever direction the breeze deems fit? And, in “Honeybee”, she imagines what a relief it might be to use the humble honeybee as a mouthpiece for our (mis)communications. Taking out the human factors of feeling, ego and translational confusion, our never-ending complexities are rendered absurd in the face of the insect’s pure and humble instinct to live, and to love. Once we remember to appeal to nature, our basic human needs are made simple and innocent once again.

I want to live my life with my heart unfurled. I want to be elegant past all dreaming. But I also want to be a lily, and ask the honeybee for help. I want to choose moments to take my working papers and turn them in. I want to bloom by day and bloom by night, and make blooming my delight.

When was the last time you considered the lilies?

I Have Considered the Lilies

Words and Music by Elizabeth (Connie) Converse

I have considered the lilies
They never toil, they only bloom
They never feel chilly or tired or silly
And they don't need much room

I have considered the lilies
I have considered how they grow
Tell me, tell me how to be a lily
If you know

Oh lilies, toil not, neither do they spin
I'm gonna take my working papers
And turn them in
I'm handing over my pencil and pen
I won't be needing my broom again
I'll bloom by day, I'll bloom by night
And blooming will be my delight

Wry tigerlily
Still waterlily
See how they all dilly-dally
Look at the day lily, lemon lily, calla-lily
And the lovely little lilies of the valley

Oh lilies, toil not, neither do they spin
I'm gonna take my working papers
And turn them in
To be more splendid than Solomon
I'll walk around wearing the morning sun
The sun by day, the moon by night
And blooming will be my delight

Honeybee

Words and Music by Elizabeth (Connie) Converse

Honeybee
Go and tell the starling
To go and tell my darling
To hurry home to me

Honeybee
Say I'm sad and lonely
And say I'm wishing only
His loving smile to see

We had a fight and he's been gone
An hour by the clock upon the shelf
He was right, but I'm too proud
To go and tell him so myself

So, honeybee
Go and tell a starling
To go and tell my darling
To hurry home to me

Fortune’s Child 1954 (rev. 1960)

Listen to Fortune’s Child

John Brady 1953

Listen to John Brady

In the next two songs, we can hear Connie’s remarkable ability to capture audiences with both pathos and humour – often, a troubling, intoxicating combination of the two.

Though they seem quite opposite in mood and matter, both Fortune’s Child and John Brady explore the tragedy of an unfulfilled love, whether by choice or star-crossed fates.  

We’ve all been a John Brady in our lives, pining after something or someone who may not deserve or suit our attentions, wilting our own self-confidence away in the process. Do we take these rejections as an honour or embarrassment? Connie presents a comical middle-ground response in “John Brady” – the opposite of her celebrated “Cowboy of the Western World”. Like the other cowboy, he “lives with his heart unfurled”, but in this real world, this vulnerability hurts him. “Weep a tear for John Brady”, Connie instructs us, because he is about to have his heart broken – even his life lost! Nevertheless, having suffered romantic betrayal, in the eyes and ears of the listener, he is positioned morally higher –  though he has ‘lost’ at achieving his life’s desires, he has in fact ‘won’ in the moral battle of favour, which begs the personal question – which is more important?

In Fortune’s Child, we have a much more grounded, honest conversation between two people who are closer to seeing their relationship eye to eye, lamenting what cannot, and perhaps never can, be. The speaker recalls a relationship in which they “never could go hand in hand, so to [your] love [I] only smiled”. Achingly telling of the deep complexity and unknowability of people even from within the intimacy of romance, there are echoes of an unpublished song of Connie’s from this time. In “A Thousand Shapes and Shades”, she sings: “your heart has a thousand shapes and shades, and I know I shall never learn them all.”

The juxtaposition of these two songs captures one of many dualities of conflict in Connie’s life – of secrecy versus pride; of the need to be seen, and the need to hide – in love, in friendships and in her art.

Fortune’s Child

Words and Music by Elizabeth (Connie) Converse

You see no other name is signed
You may recall my heart was wild
And to your love, I paid no mind

We never could go hand in hand
So to your love, I only smiled
And you could never understand
That I was fortune's only child

You used to ask me what I wanted
I said "The world, and time, and space"
My heart was wild, my head was haunted
With every new and smiling face

I said I'd wait 'til fortune smiled
I said I'd never change my mind
This letter comes from fortune's child
But when was fortunе ever kind

John Brady

Words and Music by Elizabeth (Connie) Converse

Weep a tear for John Brady
Seven long years he loved his lady
He was a simple guy
Singing, 'I'll love her 'til I die'

Weep a tear for John's lady
Seven long years she went with Brady
All he could say or sigh
Was, 'Lady I'll love you 'til I die'

Somebody else said, 'Lady, be mine
I've got a house with a flowering vine
I'll take you out to faraway shores
And everything I have is yours'

Weep a tear for John Brady
Six foot under where it's shady
He was a simple guy
Singing, 'I'll love her 'til I die'

In My Craft or Sullen Art 1956

Listen to In My Craft or Sullen Art

Anyone Lived In a Pretty How Town 1957

Listen to Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town

In the early 1950s, Connie became close friends with Maude Brogan, a fellow freethinker in the Greenwich Village with whom she travelled cross country – a rare and daring feat for the time, especially for two single women. One aspect of the friendship, for better or worse, was Maude’s encouragement for Connie to move away from her guitar songwriting, and to explore deeper instead her more ‘formal’ compositions, including piano writing. Thus from about 1955 onwards, her compositions evolved from the pre-folk sound to the art song world, almost akin to the Lieder of Romantic composers such as Schubert and Brahms. The stricter approach to rhythm, form, and performance practise that accompanied these works also lent a more severe atmosphere to underline the words. On the topic of words, Converse did not pen these particular ones – rather she composed musical settings to poems she admired. Living at the time only a couple of blocks away from the Whitehorse Tavern, the old hangout joint of her literary idol Dylan Thomas, Connie was drawn not only to him, but also to a particular poem of his poem of his – a timeless ode to artists found in “In My Craft or Sullen Art”. Thomas declared the artists’ need to create for arts sake, as opposed to any capital or social gain. For Connie, the unconforming, uncompromising visionary, this message would have echoed straight into her soul.

In My Craft and Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town were both written at a time when many of Connie’s loved ones started going through the next expected ‘stages’ of life, “saying their nevers and sleeping their dreams”; both her brothers having married and started families, and many of her close friends moving away from New York.

If E.E Cummings was being whimsical and genuine in his poem, Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town, which celebrates the charming everyday goings-on of a busy community – it is hard not to hear a certain layer of cheerful mockery from Converse. There pokes through a light jest at the institutions and social expectations she had lived her whole life running away from – highlighted well through Cummings’ delightfully babbling lyric subversions.

On a darker level, another reading can also be conjured, when one remembers Connie’s dear school friend and lifelong confidant, Frannie Flint.

Also haunted by artistic dreams beyond what their New Hampshire world seemed to offer, Frannie understood Connie, perhaps better than anyone. News of her untimely death, a decade earlier than the composition of Anyone Lived, was spread in newspapers for its tragic sensationalism. Her body was found in the frozen woods of Boston in 1947, just weeks after spending what appeared to be a happy Thanksgiving with family and friends. It was ruled as a suicide. She was 22 years old.

It seems that Connie chose from this point on, to pivot her creative efforts from journalism to more music-making. Perhaps this was her way of honouring Frannie, herself a gifted musician in her life. A heartbreaking poem was found in Connie’s filing cabinet addressed to Frannie. As we are about to hear in Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town, one can hear echoes of E.E Cummings in her words, with their absurd subversions of grammar and sense, barely enough to capture the unravelling mess of her grief.

You found your me; I found my you, And thus Did us Take birth: As grass finds green, and sky finds blue And meets to form the earth. But now your me is left alone; I rue My you Who parted. Our came was quickly turned to gone, And just when us had started. I heard a was the other day: Hush—a footstep fell; And though I looked it passed away, And whither—who can tell? Can how? or why? Can you? or I? All is nothing; no one knows, And yesterday won’t let him say, That’s why my was is goes.

In My Craft or Sullen Art

Words by Dylan Thomas, Music by Elizabeth (Connie) Converse

Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,

I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages

But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.
Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write

On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
From the raging moon I write

Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

Anyone Lived In a Pretty How Town

Words by E.E Cummings, Music by Elizabeth (Connie) Converse

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn’t he danced his did.

Women and men(both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn’t they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain

children guessed(but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more

when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone’s any was all to her

one day anyone died i guess
(and noone stooped to kiss his face)
busy folk buried them side by side
little by little and was by was

all by all and deep by deep
and more by more they dream their sleep
noone and anyone earth by april
wish by spirit and if by yes.

Women and men(both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain

New York Departures, A Hidden Legacy

It’s 1956, and it’s been seven years since Connie has proven herself willing to be a lucky resident of New York City. But her spring days of the close-knit New York gang are coming to an end – her friends have moved, or married, or married and moved, or divorced and moved. Connie herself did her fair share of moving in this time, completing cross-country trips with friends, family and even by herself; travelling back home to Concord; and moving to different locales of New York. It’s been two years since her performances at the Gene Deitch house parties, which, though they were loved and remembered by all who attended, did not lead to wider, public recognition. Her day job of writing for the Amerasian Institute of Public Relations had been declining for a few years prior, the institution suffering under budget cuts and McCarthyist anti-communist investigations. Her own brother Phil suspected her as a “Red” – but for all her left-leaning tendencies, Connie was able to keep her political views under the authorities’ radar.

Perhaps this was why she was hesitant to write overtly political protest songs? As we would come to know only a few years later, this counter-culture became the ‘new’ folk sound and ideology; yet we know Connie was not an unpolitical person. Her later years in Ann Arbor would see her devote herself to peace advocacy through high-profile peace strategy journalism.

Despite her friends’ departures from New York, Connie still enjoyed their encouragement from afar. She even gained a new fan, and advocate, of her music – fellow singer Susan Reed. Though she was arguably even less well-known than Connie, her enthusiasm was sweet and encouraging – with no prompting from Connie, she programmed a set full of her songs at the Kaufmann Hall that year, in November 1961. She wrote to Connie of the reception: “Nothing exciting happened after the tryout of your songs…“My friends liked them. I guess your friends didn’t . . . It hurts my feelings…. We just have to find our audience.”

But Connie wasn’t interested in ‘finding’ her audience. She never tried to appease any markets, never tried to fit a mould – and just when the wind was about to change, and the world was ready to listen to and understand the intimacy of her music – Connie had given up. In 1961, she packed her bags and left New York with no intentions to continue her music. That very same year, a young Bob Dylan arrived in the city, and he, among others such as Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell would soon carry on Connie’s hidden musical legacy.

Vanity of Vanities 1956

Listen to Vanity of Vanities

Incommunicado 1956-57

Listen to Incommunicado

What is the greatest vanity of vanities? To want to be ‘the best’, surpassing others in your field no matter the cost? To care about your looks alone? Connie had no such vain ambitions – she just wanted to be her own true self, her own true artist. Sadly, this desire to create and to be seen authentically, turned out to be the ‘vanity’ that her world, and the market, did not yet appreciate.

But perhaps it wasn’t all bad. Connie had long been used to a life of rejection and repression – by making her own decisions, whether to aspire or to depart and reset – the very act of making them was defiance; an insistence to live on her own terms. And for this puzzled journey towards peace, or self-acceptance, or even happiness, Connie has this advice for us – taken from her pre-1960 miscellaneous writing folder named ‘TRIES’. “While writing codes for happiness, include health, creation, recognition, and love. Insert a footnote to the effect that happiness can be obtained without taking it away from someone else.”

It was in this understanding of the inherent complexities of life – its emotional dualities, its nevers, its consistencies, its secrecies, wants and resignations – that Connie wrote her next two compositions. Following on in her ‘formal’ compositional era that was so encouraged by close friend Maude, we hear Connie at the height of her pianistic and poetic powers, narrating stories of frustration. In “Incommunicado”, we hear Connie (or perhaps a fictional protagonist) appealing to a lover, exasperated at their inability to understand one another. Resigned to their communication troubles, Connie gives up and gives in – what use for more words and more fighting? Life is too short and our hearts are too burdened. “there’s nothing worth repeating but a kiss”.

Vanity of Vanities

Words and Music by Elizabeth (Connie) Converse

When I came home to Tombstone
There was a man there
Could change copper into gold
With a brown bucket full of cloudy water

And a magic tenpenny nail
This will take a while, says he
Put your pennies in the pail
Find yourself some scenery

I don't know just where I went to
And I stayed longer than I meant to
Walking in the crystal air
As I dreamed of fortune rare

When I came back to Tombstone
There was a man there
Could preach sinners into heaven
With a frock coat that had a velvet collar

And a tongue I'd heard once before
Never mind your gold, says he
Gold is a vanity, barred from eternity
By the needle's eye, you know

So when I came out of Tombstone
I was heaven-bound and mollified to go

Incommunicado

Shall I then expect a summer snow?
Because you tell me so
I might as well believe
My absence made you grieve
That tongue turns rain to snow and false to true
What's grief to me is summer snow to you

Shall I then leave you again?
La la la la
Or shall I stay and see true misery?
La la la la

Shall I then forestall your next remark?
By yawning in the dark
I know what it will be
It's nothing new to me
When your invention fails, remember these
There's nothing worth repeating but a kiss

Will you then kiss me again?
La la la la
Or must I wait and hear one more, my dear?
La la la la

Shall I then repeat my sweetest word?
Because you have not heard
While my confection melts
You think of something else
Who hears it leaves the other one behind

Hold still if you will, so I can find your wandering mind
And if you ask once more in your deplorable way, "what did you say?"
In fire and fury I shall die

And if I fail to catch your eye
Shall I then perish again?
La la la la
Why shall I live to be your misery?
La la la la

One by One 1954

Listen to One by One

Trouble 1950-1

Listen to Trouble

Aside from her mysterious disappearance, another reason that Connie’s music haunts us so is for how prophetic many of her lyrics and musings seem to be of the current world. We live supposedly more connected than ever, through the fast-paced abundance of technology, news and travel. And yet it is often through these vehicles that we are torn even further apart. Such is the personal, yet prescient message in One By One. In a letter from Frannie Flint, dated July 27, 1942, she recalls to Connie, how the pair “used to walk at night”. Could the lyrics of One by One be a sad ode to the best friends, walking together “in the night” in Connie’s dreams and memory, where each are separated by their respective realms of life and death? Even if it is about them, or if it is a more realistic depiction of a different, dwindling relationship of Connie’s  - it paints our modern society well. We go to the greatest lengths to secure privacy and boundaries – not more for the intimacy of our relationships but for our own personal space. Yet the more we push apart, the more we crave connection, and the harder it is to come back together. “We go walking one by one; We can hear each other pass, but we’re far apart.” If only we could find each other again. Perhaps if we did, like Connie, we could take the hand of another, and “shine like the morning sun”.

Trouble takes us back to the beginnings of Connie’s New York venture. Written in 1951, it is not as ridden with anxiety in its musical language as in some of her later works, but still carries deep poignancy in the lyrics. Ever in conflict, Connie (or whoever Connie is channelling) simultaneously complains to her lover, and begs them to stay. “Ever since we met the world's been upside-down… But if you go away, as trouble ought to do,
where will I find another soul to tell my trouble to?” The poor lover is being framed as Trouble itself – or perhaps it is purely to the concept of trouble, that Connie is referring. Either way, much like in Fortune’s Child, she conveys the idea that she has somehow been fated to be with, or in, trouble. While trouble is a nuisance and a curse, it is also an inherent, inextricable part of life – what would we be without it?

One by One 

Words and Music by Elizabeth (Connie) Converse

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

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

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

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

Trouble

Words and Music by Elizabeth (Connie) Converse

Ever since we met the world's been upside-down,
and if you don't stop troublin' me you'll drive me out of town.
But if you go away, as trouble ought to do,
where will I find another soul to tell my trouble to?

My bed is made of stone, a star has burnt my eye,
I'm goin' down to the willow tree and teach her how to cry.
But if you go away, as trouble ought to do,
where will I find another soul to tell my trouble to?

They bid me wear my hat, put on a nice new gown;
I tossed my bonnet over the roof and I guess it won't come down.
But if you go away, as trouble ought to do,
where will I find another soul to tell my trouble to?

Talkin’ Like You (Two Tall Mountains) 1951

Listen to Talkin’ Like You (Two Tall Mountains)

How Sad, How Lovely 1952

Listen to How Sad, How Lovely

We finish our concert with two of Connie’s youngest, most ironic and iconic songs. If there had to be one song to summarily capture Converse’s early cognitive dissonance, it might be in Talkin’ Like You (Two Tall Mountains). Connie transitions from a spooky warning song to a laughing break-up ditty, comparing her lover to a pig and “sort of a squirrel thing”. To the lover, she declares she has no need of them – nature keeps her in better company. “I don’t stand in the need of company, when everything I see” – pigs, squirrels and all – are “talkin’ like you”. Talk about a burn.

As the song turns back to its haunting, minor refrain, Connie reestablishes the grandeur, yet unease of the setting, inspired by an actual place that she frequented as a child. At the White Mountains of New Hampshire, between two mountains, there really is a place – a lake, in fact, called Lonesome. How vivid those visits, and how stark her memory must have been, to have injected such powerful imagery into her music, decades later.

How Sad, How Lovely remains Connie’s most popular song today. It is perhaps the most emblematic piece in her oeuvre, distilling the little, quiet sentiments that make life feel so emotional, beautiful and brief. Unknowingly penned to become the title of the 2009 compilation album that introduced her to the world, Converse gives a language to some of the most profound and fleeting experiences of the human condition – even if they are just about moments spent admiring shades of light. Converse marvels at the wonder “to see the sunset at the end of the street; and the day gathered in to a single light.” And, at the same time, she laments life’s mortality: “Too few, too few are the days that will hold your face”. Indeed, far too few were the days that held Connie Converse. Now, decades after her disappearance – through her music, her art and her life – she is brought to the light.

Talkin’ Like You (Two Tall Mountains)

Words and Music by Elizabeth (Connie) Converse

Don't see why they call it lonesome
I'm never lonesome when I go there

See that bird sitting on my windowsill; well he's saying whip-poor-will all the night through
See that brook running by my kitchen door; well it couldn't talk no more if it was you
Up that tree there's sort of a squirrel thing
Sounds just like we did when we were quarrelling
In the yard I keep a pig or two
They drop in for dinner like you used to do

I don't stand in the need of company with everything I see talking like you
Up that tree there's sort of a squirrel thing
Sounds just like we did when we were quarrelling
You may think you left me all alone, but I can hear you talk without a telephone
I don't stand in the need of company with everything I see talking like you
See that bird sitting on my windowsill
Well, he's saying whip-poor-will all the night through
Just whip-poor-will all the night through

In between two tall mountains there's a place they call lonesome
Don't see why they call it lonesome
I'm never lonesome now I live there

How Sad, How Lovely

Words and Music by Elizabeth (Connie) Converse

How sad, how lovely
How short, how sweet
To see the sunset at the end of the street
And the day gathered in to a single light
And the shallows rising
From the brim of the night

Too few, too few are the days that will hold your face
Your face in a blaze of cold
How sad, how lovely
How short, how sweet
To see the sunset at the end of the street
And the lights going on in the shops and the bars
And the lovers looking for the first little signs

Like life, like your smile, like the fall of leaf
How sad, how lovely, how sweet