Music |
Eva Cassidy
By
Published: Nov 25, 2012
Category:
Rock
When they make the Eva Cassidy movie — and they will, they will — the climax will almost surely come in September of 1996 at a Washington, DC club called the Bayou.
The occasion: a tribute concert.
The recipient: a 33-year-old singer almost unknown outside of Washington.
The reason for this concert: Eva Cassidy has been diagnosed with cancer and told she has four months to live.
In this scene, Eva enters on a walker, her hair lost to chemotherapy, her body obviously ravaged. Her friends perform in her honor. And then, with difficulty, she takes the stage and does one song, her signature number:
I see trees that are green
Red roses too
I watch them bloom
For me and you
And I think to myself
What a wonderful world.
Not a dry eye in the house? No, there are two: Eva’s. Her performance is flawless. And then she goes home to bed.
Two months later, Eva Cassidy died.
Eva Cassidy was an eccentric. Though blonde and attractive and a peerless interpreter of love songs, she wore baggy clothes and avoided romance. She’d swerve her truck so she didn’t kill caterpillars, then turn in to the drive-through for junk food. She gobbled life, but after a first diagnosis of melanoma in 1993, she never kept her follow-up appointments. Her voice could sound as brassy as Joplin’s; she was terminally insecure.
She carried this divided self into her career — or what passed for a career. She cherished the recording process, but was terrified of live performance. Although she could interpret any song, she was no writer. And this, most of all: She was a lifelong innocent who chose songs without regard to genre, and that total refusal to make it easy for record executives was a deal breaker — they didn’t sign her because they didn’t know how to classify her.
Well, now we know how to classify her: cult.
Someone sick or dying? Give an Eva Cassidy CD.
Grieving? Try Eva.
Weary? Feeling small? Tears in your eyes? Eva.
This is very regrettable. The Cassidy cult obscures the Cassidy recordings — it’s hard to listen to them without being crushingly aware that the singer’s voice has been stilled. And the thing is, they don’t need that special pleading. They’re really good. Eva Cassidy, though scarcely trained, had a voice the greatest music student would envy. She was one with the song; she sang from the heart, without inflection. [To buy the CD from Amazon, click here. For the MP3 download, click here.]
To hear her is to want to hear more. But start, sensibly, with "The Best of Eva Cassidy." The songs are all over the map. But listen to her do Sting’s "Fields of Gold," and you’ll get the idea.
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