Yep, been on to Eva for quite a while now daydreamer, she was fabulous
Another early end for a largely unappreciated hugely talented artist, who didn't even have a recording contract at the time of her passing, until around 5 years later on.
Another great somewhat overlooked talent is Grace Potter dd
Have put a few of her tracks here for you, to listen to..
She can sing anything...
Eva's success is so bittersweet'
Eva Cassidy's haunting voice has turned her into a star - five years after her death from cancer, at 33. Charles Laurence meets her parents
By Charles Laurence
12:00AM GMT 27 Feb 2001
IT is three o'clock on a winter's afternoon and a shaft of sunlight lands on the statue of an angel. The light seems to set the white clay face ablaze. This is all the more startling because the angel, which stands on a lawn in suburban Maryland, is made from scrap iron, with rusty old saw blades serving for celestial wings.
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Bittersweet: Eva Cassidy whose voice has posthumously made her a star |
"She catches the sunlight pretty good, standing there," says Hugh Cassidy, who made the figure in the workshop at the end of his garden. He is watching from his kitchen table, where we are drinking coffee. "We put her there so that we could see her every morning when we get up and make breakfast. It is Eva. Of course it's Eva."
Hugh is the father of Eva Cassidy, a singer whose haunting voice and unconventional style have made her a sudden and unexpected success on both sides of the Atlantic. Her album, Songbird, has reached number three in the British charts and is heading for platinum sales.
Songbird has been a success because of local radio play and word of mouth. There are no billboards advertising Eva Cassidy, no tabloid controversies over foul lyrics or exposed body parts, and no flashy videos. Instead, there are stories of drivers pulling over to weep after hearing her sing Somewhere Over the Rainbow, from the Wizard of Oz, or Louis Armstrong's What a Wonderful World, and of businesswomen rushing to fix their mascara before greeting the boss, having heard her voice.
But Eva Cassidy has been dead for five years. She died of cancer at 33, without a record contract, never having got further in life than temporary jobs and rented flats a bus ride from the house where she grew up and where her statue stands.
"When I visited her in hospital, I told her I was going to go home and make her an angel," says her father, a retired teacher and a talented sculptor."But she passed away before I could get it made. It took me a year to finish it, but then I realised it was no longer for her. It was her."
Grief has mellowed after five years but for a parent there is no greater sorrow than losing a child. As we watch the sun play on the angel, Cassidy's mother, Barbara, sits very quietly at her end of the table and lets a tear roll down her cheek.
"Eva had a childlike sense of wonder about her, and she never lost that," Barbara says. "She had such an eye for beauty. We liked to go for walks together, and to the beach, and she would always point things out: the clouds, a tiny flower, a pebble. Nothing ever escaped her.
"I cannot listen to her music much. But I do in the autumn. I have to listen to her when I see the falling leaves. But I have to be on my own, and very, very quiet."
It has been strange, she says, witnessing this unexpected success of a daughter who was only just beginning to emerge from a difficult and painful adolescence; and stranger still dealing with the extraordinary level of reverence her posthumous albums have inspired in her fans. Signed, as she was dying, to a small Californian record label - Blix Street Records, best known for its recordings of the folk singer Mary Black - Cassidy is clearly becoming a cult figure.
"It is bittersweet," says her father. "We get these wonderful letters from people. They remember exactly what they were doing when they first heard her: they all seem to have ended up weeping, touched in some very deep way, a healing way."
In her lifetime, Cassidy had seemed to be almost too fragile to function. The Cassidys were a family full of promise. Hugh Cassidy met Barbara while in Germany, serving his time as a GI; he had a band, and when he left the army in 1959, he went on the road playing bass with a "tuxedo band" called The Saxtons.
They had two children: Eva, and a year later, Dan, who is now a folk musician and lives in Iceland. When Eva was seven, her father bought her a cheap guitar and taught her to play. At weekends, father, son and daughter performed at weddings and at a local amusement park as a "family band".
But that ended in tears one evening when Eva dropped her microphone, burst into tears and ran off the stage. "The truth was that she was very, very shy," says Cassidy.
High school triggered an adolescent depression. Eva was small and shy and loved mermaids and fairies, art and music, and was shocked to find herself amid the competitive sports "jocks" of a suburban school. Her father, disappointed at Eva's poor grades, took a tough line.
"Someone had to be the disciplinarian," he says. "Oh, Hugh," sighs Barbara. "It wasn't like that. I think Eva was just too sensitive. She would get the winter blues, she would be just so sad. I was her friend: the rituals helped her most, like baking cookies.
"All her life, she would come home to me so we could bake cookies. And in winter, I would send her notes, saying that the sun would set today, telling her that there was hope, that the days would get longer."
After leaving school, Eva went to work with her mother in a local flower nursery, low-paid work which they both loved. Off and on, Eva would leave home to live with a boyfriend, but her relationships did not last. She once told a friend that she found that having sex with a man ruined a relationship because it always seemed to prompt him to want to control her. The spectre of her father seemed to haunt her.
"We butted heads, that's true," he says. "I think that all her life Eva was still scratching at that young people's angst." And she always wanted to do things her way. "Underneath, Eva always had a very determined vision of what she wanted to do," says Barbara. "Money was never her object, she always sang for the pure pleasure of singing."
The seeds of Cassidy's belated success were planted when she turned up to sing backing vocals at a small studio owned by Chris Biondo, a lawyer's son. He became her mentor, lover and bass player in her band. He also introduced her to a star of the local Washington black music scene, Chuck Brown, who refused to believe that the pixie-like blonde in the studio was the black woman he thought he had heard singing harmonies on tape. Her first recording, Live at Blues Alley, was made by Biondo, with the help of Brown.
Eric Clapton and Mick Fleetwood are among those who have said that they would have loved to have recorded songs with Cassidy. There have been times when musicians have tried to contact her through Blix Street Records and been shocked to hear that she is dead.
It turns out that she was dying even as she gained her first, local following. Three years earlier, she had a small, dark mole removed from her back. "It was cancerous, the first sign of the melanoma that killed her," her mother says. "But after it was removed, the surgeons said they had caught it early, and that she would be fine."
Eva was very fair and liked to spend her time in the sun. But her parents had no idea of her fate until September 1996, when she began to feel weak, and had great pain in one hip.
The hip, it turned out, had been fractured in a fall. Pre-operative tests revealed that the melanoma, far from being beaten, had reached her lungs. Cassidy was dead within two months.
She had made a final public performance in her favourite haunt, the Blues Alley club in Washington DC. She was carried to the stage, her head, bald from treatment, wrapped in a bandana, then she picked up her guitar and managed to sing What a Wonderful World without missing a beat. "Nobody who saw that could hold back the tears," says her father, turning away at the memory.
Earlier this month, a video tape of Cassidy singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow was played on the BBC's Top of the Pops 2. The switchboard took hundreds of calls and
amazon.com was flooded with orders for Songbird. Even today, in New York and London, it is difficult to find her records, for they are variously stocked under folk, or blues, or even country and western, but Blix - and the British distributor, Hot Records - are doing their best to keep up with demand.
There is, says Hugh Cassidy, with enormous pride, some force, far from the commercial mainstream of cheap music and expensive packaging, which is fuelling his daughter's success.
"I think people are hungry for a sense of the genuine," he says. "There is something almost mystical about this, as if this was meant to be Eva's destiny all along. I just wish she had stayed around a bit longer, so that we could all have seen her grow."
