Florence Foster Jenkins and the cinematic allure of musical enigmas

Last week saw the release of Florence Foster Jenkins, a biopic based on the life one of the worst singers of all time – Florence Foster Jenkins was widely regarded as a completely hopeless singer, a fact she didn’t let get in the way of attempting to forge a musical career. Recordings from the time betray a complete lack of pitch, rhythm, intonation, and tone – a fact that may have been linked to a syphilis-linked decay of her central nervous system. Cheery! While the Stephen Frears-directed film, starring Meryl Streep, may have been welcomed with more praise than Jenkin’s singing voice, she’s not the only outsider musician out there who deserves to have a film made about her. Here are four more left-field performers who deserve a movie of their own:

Big Edie

Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale, otherwise known as ‘Big Edie’, may have already had a film made about her – in the form of Albert and David Maysles’ 1975 documentary Grey Gardens, which charts the destructive and isolating relationship between her and her daughter, ‘Little Edie’ – but such a large character deserves a film all of her own. Beale, the aunt of Jackie Kennedy, used to be an amateur singer, before she ensconced herself in her dilapidated mansion, and fell into poverty. Grey Gardens is a disturbing, twisted film, in which the destitution of the main characters is only enlivened by Little Edie’s frequent quotable lines – ‘I only care about three things: dancing, swimming, and the Catholic church – and Big Edie breaking out into song. In her late 70s when the film came out, Big Edie’s voice is as strong as ever, belying an early talent. A film looking at her early life would be a fantastic companion piece to Grey Gardens.

The Space Lady

Moving on, The Space Lady, a paradigm of the outsider music movement, spent much of the 1970s and 80s singing melancholic covers of popular songs on the streets of Boston and San Francisco. Initially accompanied by an accordion, she later made the switch to a Casio synthesiser keyboard, which gave her songs a cosmic edge; despite the limitations of the synthesiser, which only has six rhythm patterns, she managed to convert an astonishing range of music into her unique vision. Retiring in 2000, many commentators speculated about her whereabouts, fuelled by online bootlegs of her recordings. In 2012 she came out of retirement, the resurgence in interest securing her a record deal and a world tour. We all love a redemption tale in film, and the fact that she’s still performing makes a documentary all the more necessary.

Shin Jung-Hyun

All the best musicians fight against ‘the man’, but South Korea’s “Godfather of Rock”, Shin Jung-Hyun went further than most. Active in the 1960s and 70s, Shin became known in Korea for his psychedelic-tinged rock, which drew on the influences introduced by marines stationed at U.S. Army bases. It drew the attention of President Park Chung-Hee, who asked Shin to write a song in praise of the presidency – Shin refused, and instead composed ‘Beautiful Rivers and Mountains’, a song that extolled the natural beauty of Korea, and ironically took its name from a line in the national anthem. Needless to say, President Park didn’t take it well, and Shin was tortured in prison, before being committed to a psychiatric hospital. As Korea explores its recent history, with novelists like Han Kang leading the charge, it’s time a film was made about Shin, and his daring refusal to conform.

Connie Converse

Finally, the saddest tale of the bunch: Connie Converse moved to New York City in the 1940s, hoping to break it in the gestating folk scene. While popular with other musicians on the scene, for whom Converse would perform, her melancholic folk was never popular with the public. Her songs a both winsome and tragic, and Converse was really ahead of her time – one of the earliest singer-songwriters in a world that would soon become saturated with them. Following the stratospheric success of Bob Dylan, she left New York for Ann Arbor, and then in 1974 she distributed notes to her family and friends, and set off in her Volkswagen Beetle for a better life. She was never heard from again. A documentary in the style of Searching for Sugar Man, looking for where Converse went, would bring her beautiful folk to light.