Welcome to Aaron Manky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of I Heart Radio and

Grim and Mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book,

all of these amazing tales are right there on display,

just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. We often use the term ahead of their time to describe people who made great breakthroughs in arts or science.

Leonardo da Vinci was ahead of his time. made great breakthroughs in arts or science.

Leonardo da Vinci was ahead of his time,

as was Galileo Galileo Galilei.

They're people whose contributions to our world

will always be celebrated.

But those are the lucky ones. Sometimes being ahead of your time

means no one will understand you until long after you're gone. In January of

2004, Music Historian David Garland aired a special episode of his New York radio show

spinning on air. He was interviewing Jean Ditchie, a former Denizin of Greenwich Village

in the 1960s. Jean spent a lot of time making amateur recordings of up-and-coming folk and rock musicians.

During the show, Jean played an old tape that he'd made of a friend of his in the 1950s, an aspiring folk singer-songwriter named Connie Converse.

The music was startlingly modern, sounding like a singer-songwriter, but coming from years

before that style was popular.

It paired acoustic guitar with Connie's witty poetic lyrics.

The songs were often tinged with a melancholy minor.

It sounded like something Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell would record, just several years before either of them had started writing music.

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