Singing Shadows: One-album artists and their disappearances
Written by Macy Rajacich
Everyone has the opportunity to find their niche musical interests thanks to apps like Spotify or even audiophiles on social media. “Discover weekly” is a perfect example. It’s a playlist Spotify creates (and updates) for everyone and is catered towards your specific music tastes. Late last year, one song entered into my lineup: Now She’s Gone by Felt from their self-titled album in 1971. The sound is classic 70s acid-rock complete with sexy guitar riffs and rumbly lyrical cadences. Listening to the entirety of the album, I was elated with the fact that every song was a hit. A “listening” album as my dad would call it.
After seeing that Spotify only included the one album, I tried searching to see if there were more Felt releases and alas, that was all there was. Felt by Felt was a one-hit-wonder album. Except…was it a hit in 1971, or did it completely go under the radar?
There are other one-hit-wonder [studio] albums with notable ones like The Miseducation of Ms. Lauryn Hill or Jeff Buckley’s heart wrenching album Grace. There are a handful of artists and bands who have only made one studio album and then disappeared. This could have been because of many reasons: band break ups, tragic circumstances, or even the pursuit of a different musical path. Whatever the reason may be, it is also common that some just don’t want to be part of the hellscape that we call the music industry.
Album cover for Felt by Felt 1971
With Felt, there are very limited findings on what happened to the band. There is no Rolling Stones article, no Pitchfork documentation. The people putting in the research are our unsung heroes: Reddit users and small rock blogs like the Psychedelic Baby Mag. Felt mainly consisted of late teens and 20-somethings that decided to make an album and go on tour. The interview done by Psychedelic Baby Mag was with one of the band members Mychael John Thomas. He was able to talk about the journey from this band to then writing and producing later as an adult and staying true to his craft. The result? A small cult following on the band that now has millions of streams online. Users on reddit were also thanking Spotify as of late, with the algorithm putting Felt on other people’s radar. But what about the music that isn’t accessible through streaming?
I was introduced to Mathilda Beauvoir not through a music app, but through my social media feed: a captivating image of a woman surrounded by sheeted ghosts. All I received from the post was her name. I later found that she was a model, singer, dancer, and composer from Haiti. Most of her practice as an artist was rooted in voodooism, seeing as she was deemed as the “voodoo priestess”. Her husband was also someone who was involved with writings about the spiritual practice, and Beauvoir even graced the covers of his books: Voodoo: Rituals and possessions and Discovering voodoo.
Cover of Claude Planson’s book Discovering Voodoo
There is some information on the web regarding the boom of haitian dance and voodoo practices tucked away in Parisian performance halls during the 60s and 70s. There are also videos of Beauvoir singing and dancing as well in these spaces. Yet she is not found on streaming and is only available through YouTube and vinyl. Tucked away on a few sites are images of her on photo negatives and other videos of interviews with her. A lot of her audience then, and a selected handful of viewers now, praise her as someone who was able to shine a light on the beauty and the importance of voodoo as a religious practice.
For someone who was able to have an impact on these practices being more widely accepted, there is no proper biography about her and no accessible way to find out when she was born, or even if she is alive today.
This puzzling thought started bringing up another memory of when I first watched The Watermelon Woman: a 1996 film from Cheryl Dunye about a woman trying to find the history of an uncredited Black actress in a make-believe 20s plantation movie. The story of Mathilda Beauvoir follows another path of African Diasporan stories that fall by the wayside because of the lack of archival care. This could also be a story of someone who may have followed another path in her life and didn’t want to be found. Back in America during the same time period as Beauvoir, an artist by the name of Connie Converse was trying to do just that: disappear.
Listening to the podcast Binchtopia, the hosts Julia Hava and Eliza Mclamb speak a little more on the concept of privacy and settling with the idea that someone might want to stay lost. In their episode “Please I’ve Been Dying To Talk About This”, the two women go into the story of Connie Converse, a folk singer deemed as the precursor of Bob Dylan, who had two unreleased recorded albums and then disappeared. What makes her story more eerie is that her first album in the 1950s was hardly a studio album but sounded like an impromptu recording in someone’s house. It was then discovered that this “someone’s house” was the home of Gene Deitch, who recorded some of the songs himself on a Crestwood 404 tape recorder. In the recording of the song I have Considered the Lilies, you can hear someone from the back of the room say “Why don't you just sing it and we won’t record it”.
Within the last decade or so, Converse’s music resurfaced. Part of the intrigue that people have with her is that not only did she have a very unique sound for the time of those recordings, but she also disappeared rather suddenly. She was living in New York City writing and recording tracks (which you can also hear on the other released album with more of Converse’s artistic vision in mind titled Musicks) in the mid 1950s. Then, in 1961, she moved to Michigan and ventured off to become an activist advocating for social justice campaigns and against police brutality. By 1974, she eventually wrote a “farewell letter” to family and friends and completely disappeared that same year. Since then, there has been no trace of her car or her body. She was just gone.
Last passages of Converse’s goodbye letter, Artwork: Gaya Feldheim Schorr
After hearing about her story, I became so gutted. It brings me sadness when someone feels the need to leave their communities of people. Did they feel supported? I find myself asking. And when I listen back to some of these artists, they all feel so melancholy. It can be easy to typecast artists like Connie Converse or Jeff Buckley as sad and depressed because of their music. Or people like Felt and Mathilda Beavoir who might’ve snunk out of the limelight to find interest elsewhere. While writing about Converse, essayist Hanif Abdurraqib writes, “But [she] reminds us that sadness is a complex color, a result of other, primary colors intersecting over time”. I think that applies to all artists. We are more than our creations, and quite frankly, more than just our art.
The podcast episode ends with Julia and Eliza essentially hoping that Connie Converse was able to become the person that she wanted to be. Looking into these musicians is a further reminder to continue to support the artists that are starting up in the world and the ones who are near the end of their careers. The ones who might be a little lost, the ones who manage to continue to move forward, and even the ones who decide to stay in the shadows.
Written by Macy Rajacich, May 9 2024
Macy Rajacich is an artist living and working in New York. Her primary focus within their practice is oil painting, emphasizing the surreal nature of dreams and memories. Their use of writing is heavily brought on with an interest of documentation (and fears of vanishing ideas). On her days off from a 9-5, you can find Macy in her bedroom painting, working on projects for Spectacle Theater, or sunbathing with a cup of tea and listening to her friends’ lengthy voice memos.
Stand out readings: writings from the artist Leonora Carrington
Stand out albums: Luiz Bonfás Solo in Rio 1959 from Smithsonian recordings
Stand out visuals: Anything from @zebablay’s Instagram account
Macy’s instagram: @macyrajacich
