Blending Genre in Pursuit of Mystery: An Interview with Howard Fishman

By Sandell Morse

In December of 2010, musician and culture writer, Howard Fishman was at a party when a song seemed to lift him out of place and time. “The song swallowed me. The party froze. The room disappeared,” he wrote in the newly released To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse. The song Fishman heard was “Talkin’ Like You,” a song Converse had recorded in her Greenwich Village Apartment in the early fifties. Converse sang in a plaintive voice; she ...