Connie Converse was a pioneer of what’s turn into often called the singer-songwriter period, making music within the predawn of a motion that had its roots within the Greenwich Village people scene of the early Nineteen Sixties.

However her songs, created a decade earlier, arrived only a second too quickly. They didn’t catch on. And by the point the solar had come up within the type of a younger Bob Dylan, she was already gone. Not merely retired. She had vanished from New York Metropolis, as she finally would from the world, alongside along with her music and legacy.

It wasn’t till 2004, when an N.Y.U. pupil heard a 1954 bootleg recording of Ms. Converse on WNYC, that her music began to get any of the eye and respect that had evaded her some 50 years earlier than.

The scholar, Dan Dzula, and his good friend, David Herman, have been spellbound by what they heard. They dug up extra archival recordings, and assembled the 2009 album, “How Unhappy, How Pretty,” a compilation of songs that sound as if they might have been written in the present day. It has been streamed over 16 million instances on Spotify.

Younger musicians like Angel Olsen and Greta Kline now cite Ms. Converse as an affect, and musical acts from Massive Thief to Laurie Anderson to the opera singer Julia Bullock have lined her songs.

“She was the feminine Bob Dylan,” Ellen Stekert, a singer, people music scholar and tune collector advised me throughout my analysis for a guide about Ms. Converse. “She was even higher than him, as a lyricist and composer, however she didn’t have his showbiz savvy, and she or he wasn’t excited about writing protest songs.”

Seventy-five years in the past, Ms. Converse was simply one other younger artist attempting to make ends meet within the metropolis, singing at dinner events and personal salons, and passing a hat for her performances.

She knew that her songs didn’t jibe with the saccharine pop of the day. “One of these factor all the time curdles me like a dentist’s appointment,” she wrote to her brother earlier than an audition at Frank Loesser’s music publishing firm, the place she predicted what executives would say of her songs: “beautiful, however not business.”

In January 1961, the identical month that Dylan arrived from the Midwest, Ms. Converse left New York for Ann Arbor, Mich., the place she reinvented herself as an editor, a scholar and an activist.

In 1974, every week after her fiftieth birthday, she disappeared and was by no means seen once more.

Ms. Converse lived in New York from 1945 to 1960, and although she was intensely personal, she saved a diary, scrapbooks and voluminous correspondence that have been left behind after she drove away for good, providing clues about what the Manhattan chapter of her life was like. Listed here are a number of the neighborhoods, venues and websites across the metropolis that offered the musician with a backdrop for her brief however trailblazing stint as a songwriter.

The Nineteen Forties: Bohemians of the Higher West Facet

Riverside Park

In 1944, after dropping out of Mount Holyoke School in Massachusetts, Ms. Converse moved to New York. Her first job was on the American Institute of Pacific Relations, the place she edited and wrote articles about worldwide affairs. “I’m struck by the breadth of the matters she lined,” stated the up to date worldwide relations scholar Michael R. Anderson, who calls her writing and reporting “exceptional.”

She lived on the Higher West Facet. The picture of her in Riverside Park, above, was present in an previous submitting cupboard that belonged to the photographer’s widow. It is without doubt one of the first identified pictures of Ms. Converse in New York.

The Lincoln Arcade

A few of Ms. Converse’s closest mates lived and hung across the bohemian enclave often called the Lincoln Arcade, a constructing on Broadway between West sixty fifth and 66th Road. With a status as a haven for struggling artists, it had been house to the painters Robert Henri, Thomas Hart Benton and George Bellows, the final of whom had lived there with the playwright Eugene O’Neill.

The group was a hard-drinking lot, given to holding court docket late at evening. One surviving member of that crew, Edwin Bock, advised me that Ms. Converse would usually be clattering away at a typewriter, at a take away from the remainder, although typically she did issues he discovered stunning, like climbing out the entrance window effectively previous midnight to face on a ledge, a number of tales above the road.

The Fifties: Making Music within the Village and Past

23 Grove Road

Ms. Converse misplaced her job when the institute landed within the cross hairs of the anti-Communist Home Un-American Actions Committee. Someday late in 1950, she moved to the West Village and commenced a brand new section of her life as an aspiring composer and performer.

She purchased a Crestwood 404 reel-to-reel tape recorder and commenced making demos of herself singing new songs as she wrote them. It was right here, whereas dwelling alone in a studio house at 23 Grove Road that Ms. Converse wrote virtually all of her “guitar tune” catalog (together with all the things on “How Unhappy, How Pretty”).

The Village at the moment “was the Left Financial institution of Manhattan,” the author Homosexual Talese advised me, and it had “whiffs of the long run in it” by way of its permissiveness about life-style selections. Nicholas Pileggi, a author and producer, prompt that given her handle, Ms. Converse, a loner, would have had no downside hanging out by herself at Chumley’s, a former speakeasy.

The upstart guide writer Grove Press was additionally simply down the block, and she or he was near The Nut Membership at Sheridan Sq., the place jazz musicians usually performed, in addition to the extra respectable Village Vanguard.

Grand Central

Her first and solely tv look was in 1954, on the “The Morning Present” on CBS (hosted that yr by Walter Cronkite), although how Ms. Converse secured the looks and what she performed and talked about could by no means be identified (exhibits presently have been broadcast stay; no archival footage exists). As a result of this system was staged in a studio above the primary concourse at Grand Central and proven stay on an enormous display screen within the corridor, everybody bustling by the station that morning may have regarded up and caught the younger musician’s one and solely brush with success.

Ms. Converse was extraordinarily near her youthful brother, Phil. When he visited her within the metropolis for the primary time, Ms. Converse described the reunion in her irregularly saved diary, noting that the 2 “met like strangers at Grand Central, and fell to reminiscing over oysters.”

In 1955, Ms. Converse took up residence at 605 West 138th Road, in Harlem, a number of blocks away from Strivers’ Row. There, she shared a three-bedroom flat along with her older brother, Paul, his spouse, Hyla, and their toddler little one, P. Bruce, a state of affairs she known as “a cost-saving measure.” The brand new house had an upright piano, which Ms. Converse used to compose an opera (now since misplaced), a collection of settings for poems by writers like Dylan Thomas, E.E. Cummings and Edna St. Vincent Millay, and a tune cycle based mostly on the parable of Cassandra who, based on Greek mythology, was given the present of prophesy after which cursed to be by no means understood.

Circle within the Sq.

An avid theatergoer, Ms. Converse attended Jose Quintero’s 1956 revival of “The Iceman Cometh,” which made Jason Robards a star and successfully launched the Off-Broadway motion. “Did I point out that I noticed an in-the-round manufacturing of ‘The Iceman Cometh’ final month?” she wrote to Phil and his spouse, Jean, that October. “Some 4 and a half hours of uncut O’Neill, however solely the final quarter-hour discovered me squirming in my seat.”

The Blue Angel

At this erstwhile nightclub on East fifty fifth Road, distinctive on the time for being desegregated, Ms. Converse met the cabaret singer Annette Warren, who expressed curiosity in protecting Ms. Converse’s songs, and who would make a minimum of two of them, “The Playboy of The Western World” and “The Witch and the Wizard,” staples of her present for many years to return.

1960: The Misplaced Tape; Goodbye, New York

Nationwide Recording Studios

Nationwide Recording Studios, at 730 Fifth Avenue between West 56th and 57th Streets, had been open for less than a yr when Ms. Converse confirmed up in February 1960 to file an album. It was a solo session that, as a result of she did only one or two takes of every tune, solely took just a few hours. The recording was a rumor till 2014, when it was unearthed in Phil’s basement. An adman who was a fan of Ms. Converse’s music had procured the recording session for her without spending a dime. That album, the one one she made, stays unreleased.

Ms. Converse closed the circle of her peripatetic Manhattan existence by transferring again to the place she’d began: the Higher West Facet. This time, she lived in a brownstone on West 88th Road, a half block from Central Park. This was her final identified New York handle; by 1961, she was gone.

Her music, principally made in isolation or at small gatherings, was practically misplaced however for the efforts of her brother Phil, who archived what he may; David Garland, who performed her music on WNYC in 2004 and 2009; and Dan Dzula and David Herman, the scholars who, a long time later, launched her work to a brand new era.

“The primary time I performed a Connie Converse tune for a good friend, she sat silently and cried,” Mr. Dzula stated. “From that second I knew Connie’s magic would attain a minimum of just a few extra folks in a deeply private and particular method.”

He added: “May I’ve envisioned her blowing up like this after we first put out the file? Completely not. But in addition, yeah, type of!”

Howard Fishman is the creator of the brand new guide “To Anybody Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Thriller of Connie Converse.”