Eva Cassidy: Timeless Voice sold more than 12 million albums since her death at age 33.
CASSIDY FAMILY ARCHIVE
Singer Eva Cassidy Diagnosed September 17, 1996. She Passed Away on November 2nd 1996 from Melanoma. and you can’t hear her recording ‘Over the Rainbow’ without thinking about her death. You just can’t. She’s the latest artist to exemplify our emotional tie to tragic endings. – Chicago Tribune
Singer Eva Cassidy didn’t live to see her enduring success; Annapolis finally honors her – Capital Gazette – It is one of the most poignant, tragic stories in modern music. A shy singer with a voice of calming purity tries to make her mark on the world with a unique take on jazz, folk and soul standards. To the amazement of her fellow musicians, in spite of her unerringly perfect pitch and one-in-a-million talent, nobody is interested.
She plays to half-empty clubs in and around Washington DC, tries and fails to get record companies behind her and, after cashing in a small pension from her job at a garden centre, releases an album in 1996 called Live at Blues Alley — six months before dying of cancer at the age of 33. Then, in August 1998, Terry Wogan featured her rendition of Autumn Leaves on his Radio 2 breakfast show, followed by Over the Rainbow, which has become her signature song, a week later.
“Sometimes there was nobody there, sometimes a few people, and it was extremely rare that anyone would stop what they were doing and listen,” says Lenny Williams, a pianist and soundtrack composer who performed with Cassidy as part of a small jazz ensemble in the Washington DC clubs. “We thought, man, she’s the greatest singer we’ve ever heard and we can’t even break through happy hour?”
The latest development in the posthumous career of Eva Cassidy, whose estate is managed by her parents, Hugh and Barbara, is perhaps the most surprising of all. Cassidy’s handful of recordings are intimate and lo-fi; either just her voice against an acoustic guitar or with a band at live dates, where the sound of glasses clinking and people chatting threatens to subsume the onstage performance.
Now, using the same AI technology that brought clarity to the Beatles’ Let it Be sessions in Get Back, Cassidy’s voice has been isolated and set against the London Symphony Orchestra in new arrangements by the composer Christopher Willis. Given that he is more used to writing scores for films like X-Men: First Class and The Death of Stalin than asking classical musicians to play against a late singer’s voice, you have to wonder about the challenges it brought up.
The voice of Eva Cassidy is still strong – Search
Eva Cassidy “bares her soul” during an exquisite rendition of Christine McVie’s Songbird
The Musical Story if Eva Cassidy Nightline Profile 2001 – Search
“I was doubtful about the idea, just as a lot of people hearing about the project might be,” says Willis, who has come over from his home in Pasadena, Los Angeles, to talk about it over a coffee in Bar Italia in Soho. “You don’t sense an absence or a lack in Eva Cassidy’s songs, and in traditional arranging a singer has certainly not performed the material first. But then I applied my film score mindset, where the music finds opportunities to tell the story without getting in the way of the dialogue. You don’t mirror everything the character does. Otherwise it becomes like Looney Tunes.”
Instead it has become like Vaughan Williams: pastoral arrangements with a sense of subtlety and solemnity, featuring top lines that stay frequently on one note for a length of time while the harmonies move about underneath. Willis realised that to put big Hollywood-style arrangements against moments where Cassidy is baring her soul — such as on her exquisite rendition of Christine McVie’s Songbird — would be hideously sentimental. So he applied restraint instead.
“Sometimes it might be grotesque for me to shadow everything she does, so I don’t do too much,” Willis explains. “At other times I let her get a little bit swallowed up by the orchestra. You follow what she’s doing and decide how to respond.”
None of this is easy. Orchestras keep in time by following the music on the page, but Cassidy came from the jazz and folk tradition, where tempo tends to be rather more elastic. On the traditional ballad Waly Waly Cassidy evokes a languid, lamenting mood by being forever behind the beat; not easy for an orchestra to play along to. Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Tall Trees in Georgia, a poetic ballad of abandonment, proved the biggest challenge of all. “Eva strums the guitar freely, so I have no idea about what the song means metrically. I’ve ended up with what looks like a cartoon score because I’m changing the tempo and metre all the time just to fit in.”
Then there is the ethical question of adding to the music of someone who is no longer around to have a say in the matter. Alongside speaking to her family, and to musicians like Williams and her former bassist/producer (and biggest champion) Chris Biondo, Willis dealt with the situation by tailoring his arrangements not just to Cassidy’s voice but also to her personality.
“I was particularly concerned about the soul songs like Ain’t No Sunshine and People Get Ready because from what I gather, Eva Cassidy was not one to dress up like Cher and strut across the stage,” he says. “She was a quiet person, always thanking the audience and the band. Her publicity photos were taken in the countryside, probably because she worked in a garden centre. But going by the voice alone you can take inspiration from people she was like, such as Ella Fitzgerald, who did a song the same way whether she was with a small band or an orchestra. Besides, we’re used to only hearing minimal Eva Cassidy arrangements because those were the ones that worked in her lifetime. She did try out other styles.”
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Cassidy had a chameleon-like quality that meant she could apply her perfectly pitched voice to any kind of material. “Adele is a great singer but she only has a couple of gears. You can’t imagine her doing Danny Boy,” Williams says by comparison. “The remarkable thing about Eva is how eclectic she was. She would play around with a standard like Over the Rainbow, then do a straight read of Stormy Monday and knock it out of the park. Then she would go into an intimate folk song like Waly Waly and bring this sense of loss and regret.”
According to Williams, Cassidy was the antithesis of a self-promoter. “That went against all her instincts, and it became a stumbling block because she was so critical of her own voice, comparing herself to other singers in town and saying: ‘Maybe one day I’ll be as good as them.’ At the same time, she had the kind of ambition that you want in a singer: to be as good as she could be. I’ve worked with plenty of people who don’t work on their voice but work hard at being famous, and my advice is always: do less social media and more practice. If you take care of your craft, people will notice when you are functioning at a high level.”
At least you hope they will. For the Blues Alley concert (12 live performances) Cassidy’s band members invited everyone they knew and told them to clap loudly so it sounded like there were a lot of people in the place. They did a few gigs at a Washington DC club called Fleetwood’s — owned by Mick Fleetwood, appropriately — and by Williams’s estimation it was two-thirds full on a typical night, with around 20 percent of the audience there to hear Cassidy. Now she has the London Symphony Orchestra getting behind some of her most beloved songs.
The Tragedy of Eva Cassidy – by Ted Gioia
You have to wonder: what is it about Eva Cassidy’s voice that keeps on connecting so deeply, 27 years after her death?
“Eva brought calmness to people,” Williams concludes. “Maybe it is a new age quality, a spiritual vibe about her voice that people love, especially when the world is too much for them. Chris Biondo had such belief in her talent that he was sure it would happen for her one day, and he was right. It is a beautiful ending to an unspeakable tragedy.”
The voice of Eva Cassidy is still strong – Blix Street Records – Eva Cassidy
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I Can Only Be Me by Eva Cassidy and the London Symphony Orchestra (Blix Street) is out now.
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Watch “The Life & Death of EVA CASSIDY” on YouTube
At the time of her death, Eva Cassidy was unknown outside her home town of Washington, DC. She was only 33 when she died from bone cancer, just three months after diagnosis. Thankfully for us, this singer left behind an extraordinary legacy.
Fans of Cassidy say that she could sing anything – folk, blues, pop, jazz, R&B, gospel – and make it sound like it was the only music that mattered. You only have to hear her haunting interpretation of Somewhere Over The Rainbow to know this is true. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve listened to Cassidy singing that song and I still get goosebumps.
Then there’s Cassidy’s version of Sting’s Fields of Gold. And don’t get me started on Songbird. Cassidy takes Fleetwood Mac’s lyrics and makes them her own. I defy anyway to be unmoved when this young woman sings “For you, there’ll be no crying, For you, the sun will be shining, ‘Cause I feel that when I’m with you, It’s alright”.
It might seem hard to believe now but it was Terry Wogan who discovered Cassidy and was responsible for promoting Somewhere Over The Rainbow to the number one slot. The compilation album Songbird also climbed to the top of the UK Albums Charts, almost three years after its initial release.
Today, Cassidy has a devoted following, among them television and theatre actress Nicole Faraday, best known for her portrayal of Snowball Merriman in ITV’s Bad Girls. Faraday’s acting credits are too numerous to mention here but you’ll probably recognise her from, among other shows, Casualty, Emmerdale and The Bill.
However, Faraday’s passion is for singing: she performs regularly and originated the role of Shell Dockley in the musical of Bad Girls. Now she is appearing in her third tour as Eva Cassidy in Over the Rainbow.
“I’ve been performing Eva Cassidy’s material anyway as a singer and actress in my own cabarets so it’s something that’s very close to my heart,” Faraday tells Northern Soul. “It’s unbelievable that she died in our own lifetime. In Europe, she’s second only to Elvis in posthumous record sales. That’s amazing.”
Since its first performance in 2004, Over the Rainbow has garnered five star reviews and enjoyed a number of revivals. It charts Cassidy’s life, from her childhood growing up in a musical family, all the way to her premature death in 1996. “Before she died, Eva was getting local notoriety in Washington,” explains Faraday. “But she never had a recording deal, probably because she had so many different styles.”
The voice of Eva Cassidy is still strong – Search
Over the Rainbow includes 27 of Cassidy’s best-loved songs. – Search
So, which is Faraday’s favourite?
“Well, I’ve sung Songbird at quite a few of my friends’ weddings. It is my favourite to sing. I like singing sad songs, for instance I really like Autumn Leaves. That happens towards the end of the show. I think it’s so beautiful, it always makes me nearly cry, and people feel emotional about it.
“She did so many different styles, from gospel-type stuff through to folk to rock, jazz and blues. For me, it’s a big challenge singing 30-odd of her songs every night. I like to get them as accurate as possible.
Faraday says that Cassidy fans travel from the continent to see Over the Rainbow, particularly from places like Sweden and Holland where her songs are very popular. In fact, Cassidy is the only female artist to have had three consecutive posthumous number one albums. Her third album, American Tune, knocked Robbie Williams off the top spot in 2003 while Songbird, released in 1998, sold more than 100,000 in two years. And all this despite performing no more than 100 gigs in her lifetime, many to no more than 30 people.
It’s also worth remembering that the majority of Cassidy’s released recordings were only ever intended to be demo tapes and were often done in just one take. When you consider how much of today’s music is edited, honed and fussed with, it’s testament to Cassidy’s enormous talent that, nearly 20 years after her death, they still sound so pure, so moving and so perfect.
“Eva’s is a tragic story aligned with the fact that her music was so beautiful,” says Faraday. “She was a sensitive person who worried that people didn’t like her enough, and she was shy. She never really wanted to be on show. I wonder how she would have felt if she knew how hugely famous she is now.
“I think she would have been a bit of a recluse, a bit like Kate Bush – Search Videos.”
Do check out the live recording, Live at Blues Alley. For more info, click here
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