Connie Converse

Elizabeth "Connie" Converse was born in Laconia, NH which is home to an annual motorcycle week where raucous bikers drink Budweisers and possibly pay homage to her mystery. She started to write music when she moved to New York in pursuit of a career and her songs best represent the female experience of living there in the mid-twentieth century. Her complete story can be read here. The most intriguing part of her unusual life is that in 1972, after being beaten by the New York folk scene and having lived some despondent years since, she wrote her friends and family a parting letter in which she said goodbye and expressed her aims at "starting anew" somewhere else. Both her body and the Volkswagen Beetle she drove out of Ann Arbor were never recovered. Her brother believes she drove off a bridge somewhere west of Detroit.