Eva Cassidy

Eva Marie Cassidy (born February 2, 1963 in Washington, DC , † November 2, 1996 in Bowie , Maryland ) was an American singer and guitarist. She died shortly after the release of her first solo album. It wasn't until a few years later that the recordings she left became very successful and the musician became world-famous for her authoritative interpretations of classical pieces of jazz , blues , soul and gospel as well as folk , rock and pop music .

Life

Eva Cassidy was born on February 2, 1963 at the Washington Hospital Center as the third of four siblings. She had two older sisters and a younger brother. Her father Hugh had returned to the United States with his German friend Barbara after his military service in Rhineland-Palatinate . They settled in Maryland , on the outskirts of the capital Washington, DC , first in Oxon Hill , later in Bowie . Hugh Cassidy entered the school service as a teacher, Barbara Cassidy worked as a florist in a horticultural company.

Eva Cassidy showed an early interest in art and music. She started painting, drawing and doing handicrafts when she was about five years old and stayed with them until her untimely death. At the age of nine she received some guitar lessons from her father. From then on she accompanied the family's house music with singing and guitar and was soon performing in public on several smaller occasions. Her parents' large record collection became an important source of music for her, with which she passionately continued to develop her practical skills, because she not only wanted to hear her many favorite pieces, but also to sing and play.

Eva Cassidy finished her school career in 1981 with a degree from Bowie High School. Although she still enrolled for art studies at Prince George's Community College, she gave up after a short time. She had to refuse a subsequent commitment from the California Institute of the Arts for financial reasons. Then she worked in addition to her numerous musical activities, which did not bring in enough money, in various odd jobs, especially many years in a horticultural company in Beltsville.

In September 1993 Eva Cassidy had a malignant melanoma removed from her back. She neglected the follow-up examinations.

Her last job with a friend was in the summer of 1996, painting a wall in a primary school. After that, she developed pain in her hip, which she attributed to working with the folding ladder. An X-ray examination revealed a fracture in the pelvis, which was caused by tumor cells in the bone. The cancer had also spread to her lungs. Even strong chemotherapy could no longer stop him and Eva Cassidy succumbed to her ailment at the beginning of November 1996 at the age of 33.

Career and reception

Inspired by making music at home and on smaller occasions, Eva Cassidy joined the local band BTS in 1974 . They played folk music at weddings, street parties and in cafes. Eva Cassidy was the singer and found it a little difficult because of her shyness towards strangers, which she never completely lost afterwards. Later in high school, she was the singer in the student rock band Stonehenge . Occasionally she also performed with her brother Dan (iel), who played the violin and later became a musician.

For the former guitarist of Stonehenge , she took over the vocals on his CD Method Actor in 1986 and also designed the cover. During the production in Black Pond Studio in Rockville, its owner, sound engineer and bassist Chris Biondo, became aware of her voice and talent. In the following years he found her work as a background singer on productions in his studio (her biggest dream was singing for Stevie Wonder ), found her a music manager and finally persuaded her to found the Eva Cassidy Band  : Eva Cassidy (vocals, guitar) , Chris Biondo (bass guitar), Keith Grimes (electric guitar), Lenny Williams (piano) and Raice McLeod (drums). They made numerous regional appearances, mostly at events and in clubs, such as B. Pearl's in Annapolis, Maryland and Fleetwoods in Alexandria, Virginia , operated by Mick Fleetwood , the drummer Fleetwood Macs .

Most of Eva Cassidy's existing recordings were made with this band or are other recordings from the Black Pond Studio. This also applies to the collaboration between Eva Cassidy and Chuck Brown , from which the 1992 CD The Other Side emerged . Cassidy always had a decisive influence on the productions with his own arrangements and suggestions.

In 1993 Eva Cassidy received the Washington Area Music Association (WAMA) award in the category of best female singer for jazz / traditional, in 1994 she received it again for best female singer for roots rock / traditional R&B. In 1995 she was again awarded as Best Singer Jazz / Traditional and Best Singer Jazz / Contemporary.

All attempts to establish Eva Cassidy in the music business, however, failed. She didn't want to sing "that commercial crap" and also vehemently refused to be pinned on a style. That integrity was a big problem for ordinary marketing at the time. A contract that had been promised by a producer failed due to his bankruptcy.

Thereupon the Eva Cassidy Band decided to produce an album with their own modest means. At the beginning of January 1996, a performance in the famous Washington jazz club Blues Alley was organized on two evenings, recorded and self-published as CD Live at Blues Alley ("Eva Music"). Due to technical problems with the recording, however, only the material from the second evening could be used. (The recording of the first evening was finally restored and released as Nightbird in 2015. ) Both the performance itself and the CD (approx. 1000 copies) were very well received, the WAMA showered them with 9 awards.

After Cassidy's diagnosis of cancer, friends and musicians held a benefit concert in Washington in the fall of 1996 to raise money for medical treatment. There the now seriously ill Eva Cassidy said goodbye to her audience at the end of the performance with What a Wonderful World , one of her beloved standards. A little later she made the collected money available to other patients.

Also in the fall of 1996 a good friend, folk singer Grace Griffith, sent a recording of Live at Blues Alley with a strong recommendation to Bill Straw, the manager of the record company she was signed to. Straw was immediately enthusiastic and in the end actually took the risk of releasing a musician who was not only practically unknown, but also deceased, when he released the CD Songbird in 1998 .

Songbird was slow to become known, but nationally and in Great Britain, where Straw had a business partner. As a result, British producer Paul Walters became aware of the CD in 2000 and recommended it to his colleague Terry Wogan for his morning show Wake up to Wogan on BBC Radio 2. He played two of the tracks - Over the Rainbow and Fields of Gold - and then experienced one extremely stormy reaction from his large audience. In just a few months, over 100,000 CDs had been sold in the UK.

In light of this success, before Christmas of the same year, BBC television broadcast Top of the Pops 2, an amateur video recording of Over the Rainbow of Cassidy's performance at the Blues Alley jazz club . The audience reactions were overwhelming again and the demand for Songbird exploded, so that the CD was finally number one in the charts in 2001 (as well as the following albums Imagine 2002 and American Tune 2003).

This breakthrough in Britain was not only sustained, but also had a major impact on the United States and other countries. Songbird also made it into the charts in Germany in 2001, it was in the top 100 for 22 weeks and reached number 7. After further albums with the recordings that were left behind, sales in total and worldwide have now exceeded 12 million (2016).

Apart from the WAMA, Eva Cassidy has not been officially honored so far. However, there was a great deal of praise and recognition from critics and musicians, such as B. von Sting , who wrote Fields of Gold , and Katie Melua , who, as a big fan, released What a Wonderful World in a duet with Cassidy's voice as a single in 2007 , which also stormed the UK charts.

Grace Griffith remembered her impressions when she saw Eva Cassidy on stage for the first time (and others apparently felt the same way later, see www.evacassidy.org/Guestbook):

“She totally blew me away. All the colors of the rainbow, all life's palette of beauty and sadness and sweet passion and eternity. - It was all there in that voice that came from the heart and those hands. "

“She knocked me out completely. All the colors of the rainbow, the whole range of life from beauty and sadness and sweet passion and eternity. - It was all there in the voice that came from the heart and in those hands. "

Discography

Studio albums

year	title	Top ranking, total weeks, awardChart placementsChart placements (Year, title, rankings, weeks, awards, notes)					Remarks
		DE	AT	CH	UK	US
1997	Eva by Heart	-	-	-	UK95 gold (1 week)UK	-
2000	Time after time	-	-	-	UK25th gold (23 weeks)UK	US161 (1 week) US
2002	Imagine	DE39 (4 weeks) DE	-	CH38 (6 weeks) CH	UK1 silver (24 weeks)UK	US32 (3 weeks) US
2008	Somewhere	-	-	-	UK4th gold (11 weeks)UK	US136 (2 weeks) US
2010	Simply Eva	-	-	-	UK4th gold (24 weeks)UK	-

More albums

• 1985: Method Actor (with David Christopher)
• 1992: The Other Side (with Chuck Brown )
• 1994: Goodbye Manhattan (2 songs with Pieces of a Dream)
• 2001: No Boundaries (with David Christopher and Tony Taylor)

Live albums

year	title	Top ranking, total weeks, awardChart placementsChart placements (Year, title, rankings, weeks, awards, notes)					Remarks
		DE	AT	CH	UK	US
1996	Live at Blues Alley	-	-	-	UK86 gold (5 weeks)UK	-	Album of the Year (WAMA)
2003	American Tune	DE85 (1 week) DE	-	CH75 (2 weeks) CH	UK1 gold (12 weeks)UK	US112 (1 week) US
2015	Nightbird	DE99 (1 week) DE	-	-	UK17th gold (8 weeks)UK	-

Compilations

year	title	Top ranking, total weeks, awardChart placementsChart placements (Year, title, rankings, weeks, awards, notes)					Remarks
		DE	AT	CH	UK	US
1998	Songbird	DE7 (22 weeks) DE	-	CH2 gold (16 weeks)CH	UK1 × 6 Six-fold platinum (156 weeks)UK	US- platinum US	Album of the Year (WAMA)
2004	Wonderful World	-	-	-	UK11 (7 weeks) UK	-
2012	The best of Eva Cassidy	-	AT26 (7 weeks) AT	-	UK22nd platinum (25 weeks)UK	-

Singles

year	Title album	Top ranking, total weeks, awardChartsChart placements (Year, title, album , rankings, weeks, awards, notes)	Remarks
		UK
2000	Time After Time Time After Time	UK79 (1 week) UK	Chart entry in UK only in 2012
2001	Over the rainbow	UK42 silver (23 weeks)UK
2003	You Take My Breath Away American Tune	UK54 (2 weeks) UK
2007	What a Wonderful World	UK1 (5 weeks) UK	with Katie Melua
2009	Songbird Songbird	UK56 silver (3 weeks)UK

More singles

• 2007: Fields of Gold (UK:silver)

literature

• Rob Burley, Jonathan Maitland: Eva Cassidy: Songbird - Her Story By Those Who Knew Her . Orion, o.r. 2001, ISBN 0-7528-5105-5 .
• Johan Bakker: Behind the Rainbow, the tragic life of Eva Cassidy (2012) Omnibus Press, 207 pages, ISBN 978-1-78038-231-9 (The People's Book Prize 2011/2012).

Web links

• Eva Cassidy Web Site - Site of her cousin Laura Bligh with extensive information
• Eva Cassidy Artwork - Her family's page about her illustrations
• Evasongs (English) - page with their lyrics
• Eva Cassidy in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Eva Cassidy on MusicBrainz (English)
• Eva Cassidy at Discogs (English)
• Website Eva Cassidy Biography (English)
• Eva Cassidy - Live at Blues Alley - January 2nd, 1996

swell

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} Chart sources: DE AT CH UK US
2. ↑ ^{a b c d} Music Sales Awards: CH UK US