Feodor Grigoryev is a freelance musician from Saint Petersburg in Russia. He has been a professional musician since 1989. Feodor plays a slightly unusual instrument which he calls the “Bottlephone”. The instrument is something you’ll never forget once you’ve seen it played live. It consists of 24 bottles suspended in the air on strings. When Feodor hits the bottles with a “stick” or “beater” the bottles produce a sound. Each bottle is filled with a varying level of water, which tune them to make different notes when hit. Similar to The Glass Harp.
At the dawn of the Cold War era, dozens of progressive women working in radio and television were placed on a media blacklist and forced from their industry. Carol Stabile explores this shameful period in American history.
It's a lovely time of the year to dream about tropical sunlight, swimming, floating in the Caribbean Sea, ahhh.
0:00 - Talkin' Like You (Two Tall Mountains)2:30 - Johnny's Brother5:17 - Roving Woman7:58 - Down This Road9:42 - The Clover Saloon11:55 - John Brady13:42 - We Lived Alone14:58 - Playboy of the Western World18:59 - Unknown (A Little Louder, Love)19:34 - One by One21:40 - Father Neptune23:46 - Man in the Sky27:50 - Empty Pocket Waltz29:50 - Honeybee31:24 - There is a Vine32:59 - How Sad, How Lovely35:38 - Trouble
I love the video's comments too.
Elizabeth Eaton Converse was born in Laconia, New Hampshire, in 1924. She grew up in Concord as the middle child in a strict Baptist family; her father was a Baptist minister. She attended Concord High School, where she was valedictorian and won eight academic awards. She was awarded an academic scholarship to Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. After two years' study, she left the College and moved to New York City.
During the 1950s she worked for the Academy Photo Offset printing house in New York's Flatiron District and lived in Greenwich Village. She started calling herself Connie, a nickname she had acquired in New York. She began writing songs and performing them for friends, accompanying herself on guitar.
Her music came to the notice of animator and amateur recording engineer Gene Deitch, who had made tape recordings of artists like John Lee Hooker and Pete Seeger in the 1940s. Deitch made a number of tape recordings of Converse in the kitchen of his house in Hastings-on-Hudson in the mid-1950s. But she failed to attract any commercial interest in her music. Her only public performance was a brief television appearance in 1954 on "The Morning Show" on CBS with Walter Cronkite, which Deitch helped to arrange.
In 1961, she left New York for Ann Arbor, Michigan, where her brother Philip was a professor of political science at the University of Michigan. She worked in a secretarial job, and then as Managing Editor of the Journal of Conflict Resolution from 1963. Her only musical involvement continued to be playing for friends at parties.
By 1973, Connie was burnt out and depressed. Her colleagues and friends pooled their money to finance a six-months' trip to England for her. The journal, which meant so much to her, had left Michigan for Yale at the end of 1972, after being "auctioned off" without her knowledge. She was facing the need for major surgery.
In August 1974, she wrote a series of letters to her family and friends, talking about her intention to make a new life somewhere else. By the time the letters were delivered, she had packed her belongings in her Volkswagen Beetle and driven away, never to be heard from again.
In January 2004, Gene Deitch -- by then 80 years old and living in Prague since 1961 -- was invited by New York music historian David Garland to appear on his radio show Spinning on Air. Deitch played some of his own recordings, including one of Connie's songs, "One by One".
Two of Garland's listeners, Dan Dzula and David Herman, were inspired to try and put together an album of Connie's music. There were two sources: the tapes in Deitch's collection in Prague, and her brother Philip's collection of recordings which she had sent him in the 1950s. In March 2009, How Sad, How Lovely, containing 17 songs by Connie Converse, was released by
"Sad Lady" and "Sorrow Is My Name"—both previously broadcast but never released—are joined by Connie's gorgeous (albeit impromptu) arrangement of the traditional ballad "The Ash Grove." The EP closes with two of her doubletracked arrangements ("Down This Road" and "We Lived Alone," both previously released in different form on 2009’s "How Sad, How Lovely") that shed new light on her songcraft and melodic sensibility.
This album is dedicated to the memory of Gene Deitch, whose spirit and boundless enthusiasm had the power to inspire strangers, to change lives, and to help preserve the musical legacy of Connie Converse, along the way.
credits
released June 26, 2020
Music and Lyrics by Elizabeth Eaton Converse Artwork by Zachary Scheer Recorded by Connie Converse and Gene Deitch Mixed and Mastered by David Herman and Dan Dzula on the banks of the Gowanus Canal, at Good Studio, Brooklyn Produced by Dan Dzula & David Herman
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Connie Converse, Lost and Found
A play based on her life was released about three years ago, and a documentary is online. More and more frequently are re-workings of her songs; a concert, variouscontemporarycovers and a tribute album are the most notable. Musicologists even speculate that she may have been one of the earliest modern singer-songwriters of her genre, and wonder if she should be credited for it.
Connie Converse is a lesson to be learned, an enigmatic talent, and a remembrance of a foggy past. Most of all, though, she is a creator. She reminds us that even when all seems lost, it never is; time is never a detractor. Her loving lyrics and commentary on what womanhood is and should be has not ceased to be relevant since the 1950s. I encourage any womxn to take an hour and let her play; you’ll feel it. Converse may be lost to us now, but she’s living once more.
