How to Become Famous

CHAPTER 2

Shocks and Surprises

Connie Converse is widely known, of course, as the most original, and perhaps the greatest, of the folk singers of the 1950s and 1960s. Described as “the first singer-songwriter,” she is often ranked with Bob Dylan, whom she preceded. She greatly influenced not only Dylan, but also Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, James Taylor, Cat Stevens, and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young—and more recently, Aimee Mann, Beyoncé, Kanye West, and Taylor Swift.

You undoubtedly know one of her greatest hits, “Roving Woman,” whose defiant sensibility defined an era, and which can be heard on the radio even today. A glimpse:

People say a roving woman

Is likely not to be better than she ought ...