The biggest concert of her career took place in front of a tiny audience. Her breakout music video was made on a handheld camcorder. Her most important record was self-financed. All the accolades came after her death on November 2, 1996.
Eva Cassidy would eventually sell more than ten million records, and dominate the charts with three albums and a hit single. But during most of her life, Cassidy’s music didn’t even pay the rent, and she worked for fourteen years at Behnke Nurseries in Largo, Maryland—where she watered plants, transplanted seedlings, unloaded huge bales of peat moss or truckloads of trees, and undertook a range of other greenhouse responsibilities.
Cassidy was only 5 foot 2 inches, but she did physically arduous work day after day, sometimes the only woman on a crew of men. It was dirty, tiring labor, and she kept it up as long as she could. But then the medical problems started. (...)
It’s a miracle that her beloved album Live at Blues Alley was even recorded. She had to cash in a small pension to cover the costs—and with all the other medical expenses, putting that money into a recording must have struck many as foolish. And even after setting up equipment to record her two-day booking at Blues Alley in Washington, D.C., technical problems forced her to discard all the tracks from the first night.
So it all came down to one evening, January 3, 1996, when Cassidy showed up for a final chance at a live album—just three days before a huge blizzard shut down the entire city. Cassidy herself was suffering from a cold, and wondered if any of the music would be worth releasing. But at this point, there was no turning back, and she took the stage, ready to sing with all the heart and soul she possessed. (...)
Cassidy was exactly the kind of trend-breaking artist Hammond sought out, but in the mid-1990s the music industry was different, and Eva Cassidy was rejected for the very fact the she didn’t fit easily into any genre pigeonhole.
This was both her preference, but also a necessity given her skills and opportunities. As a freelancer, Cassidy had been forced to prove that she could sing any style. And even now it’s tempting to focus on just one of her skills, maybe her ability with slow ballads or jazz tunes. But some of her finest moments came with the least likely material.
For example, I sit in rapt admiration when I hear Cassidy sing the old folk ballad “Wayfaring Stranger”—which she turned into a soulful groove number. If you want to know how strange that decision was, listen to the way this song was originally sung. It’s one of the starkest traditional songs in the whole Anglo-American canon, and even though it has been updated, usually by country or folk singers, none of those versions even begins to prepare us for what Eva Cassidy achieves.
I call particular attention to how she raises her ambitions and intensity with each passing chorus—and 3:40 into the performance you feel she can’t possibly lift the level of her singing any higher. But she reaches deep, deep inside and delivers something you have to hear to believe.
It gives me chills to listen to this. But nobody talks about Eva Cassidy as a soul singer—and simply because there’s so much else she does, you could miss a track like this. But don’t.
By the same token, I never hear anyone describe Cassidy as a blues singer. But listen to what she does with “Stormy Monday,” and you will realize she could have built a whole career on raw, gritty songs of this sort.
But her most unlikely success was achieved with a song that was more than sixty years old, and performed so often that few would expect it had any new secrets to share. But at Blues Alley that night, Cassidy decided to sing “Over the Rainbow” from the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. Once again, this is the last thing you would do if you were aiming for a hit pop record in the digital age, but Cassidy picked songs because she loved them, not because they matched the items on an A&R executive’s check list.
Like me, Cassidy had heard this song every year as a child, when The Wizard of Oz was broadcast as an annual ritual on network television. She had performed it previously at a high-profile Washington DC music award show and left the audience stunned. “When she came out, I was just worried, you know, the audience was milling around and talking,” the show’s promoter Mike Schreibman later recalled. Eva’s father said that he heard someone remark: “Don’t tell me that little girl is going to try ‘Over the Rainbow’ on THIS crowd.” But they had never heard it sung like this before. “When she started to sing, they just… stopped,” Schreibman continues. “So many times I’ve heard since then, that was the first time they heard her, and how great she was. Ron Holloway said that he was on the way out the door but when he heard Eva he came back in.”
So at Blues Alley, with the recording equipment that her cashed-out pension had hired capturing this one night of music, she decided to sing it again, accompanying herself on guitar. And this performance, also preserved on film, did more than anything to catapult her to fame.
Eva Cassidy would eventually sell more than ten million records, and dominate the charts with three albums and a hit single. But during most of her life, Cassidy’s music didn’t even pay the rent, and she worked for fourteen years at Behnke Nurseries in Largo, Maryland—where she watered plants, transplanted seedlings, unloaded huge bales of peat moss or truckloads of trees, and undertook a range of other greenhouse responsibilities.
Cassidy was only 5 foot 2 inches, but she did physically arduous work day after day, sometimes the only woman on a crew of men. It was dirty, tiring labor, and she kept it up as long as she could. But then the medical problems started. (...)
It’s a miracle that her beloved album Live at Blues Alley was even recorded. She had to cash in a small pension to cover the costs—and with all the other medical expenses, putting that money into a recording must have struck many as foolish. And even after setting up equipment to record her two-day booking at Blues Alley in Washington, D.C., technical problems forced her to discard all the tracks from the first night.
So it all came down to one evening, January 3, 1996, when Cassidy showed up for a final chance at a live album—just three days before a huge blizzard shut down the entire city. Cassidy herself was suffering from a cold, and wondered if any of the music would be worth releasing. But at this point, there was no turning back, and she took the stage, ready to sing with all the heart and soul she possessed. (...)
Cassidy was exactly the kind of trend-breaking artist Hammond sought out, but in the mid-1990s the music industry was different, and Eva Cassidy was rejected for the very fact the she didn’t fit easily into any genre pigeonhole.
This was both her preference, but also a necessity given her skills and opportunities. As a freelancer, Cassidy had been forced to prove that she could sing any style. And even now it’s tempting to focus on just one of her skills, maybe her ability with slow ballads or jazz tunes. But some of her finest moments came with the least likely material.
For example, I sit in rapt admiration when I hear Cassidy sing the old folk ballad “Wayfaring Stranger”—which she turned into a soulful groove number. If you want to know how strange that decision was, listen to the way this song was originally sung. It’s one of the starkest traditional songs in the whole Anglo-American canon, and even though it has been updated, usually by country or folk singers, none of those versions even begins to prepare us for what Eva Cassidy achieves.
I call particular attention to how she raises her ambitions and intensity with each passing chorus—and 3:40 into the performance you feel she can’t possibly lift the level of her singing any higher. But she reaches deep, deep inside and delivers something you have to hear to believe.
It gives me chills to listen to this. But nobody talks about Eva Cassidy as a soul singer—and simply because there’s so much else she does, you could miss a track like this. But don’t.
By the same token, I never hear anyone describe Cassidy as a blues singer. But listen to what she does with “Stormy Monday,” and you will realize she could have built a whole career on raw, gritty songs of this sort.
But her most unlikely success was achieved with a song that was more than sixty years old, and performed so often that few would expect it had any new secrets to share. But at Blues Alley that night, Cassidy decided to sing “Over the Rainbow” from the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. Once again, this is the last thing you would do if you were aiming for a hit pop record in the digital age, but Cassidy picked songs because she loved them, not because they matched the items on an A&R executive’s check list.
Like me, Cassidy had heard this song every year as a child, when The Wizard of Oz was broadcast as an annual ritual on network television. She had performed it previously at a high-profile Washington DC music award show and left the audience stunned. “When she came out, I was just worried, you know, the audience was milling around and talking,” the show’s promoter Mike Schreibman later recalled. Eva’s father said that he heard someone remark: “Don’t tell me that little girl is going to try ‘Over the Rainbow’ on THIS crowd.” But they had never heard it sung like this before. “When she started to sing, they just… stopped,” Schreibman continues. “So many times I’ve heard since then, that was the first time they heard her, and how great she was. Ron Holloway said that he was on the way out the door but when he heard Eva he came back in.”
So at Blues Alley, with the recording equipment that her cashed-out pension had hired capturing this one night of music, she decided to sing it again, accompanying herself on guitar. And this performance, also preserved on film, did more than anything to catapult her to fame.
by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker | Read more:
Videos: YouTube
