Eva cassidy where is she from

She was sensitive to criticism, yet she had a stubborn side, making her unyielding when it came to her values and principles. Cassidy took her art projects--painting, sculpting, drawing, designing jewelry, and decorating furniture--seriously, and she enjoyed nature, hiking, bicycling, and playing guitar and singing as hobbies.

Painfully shy and self-conscious, she never considered earning a living as a professional artist or musician. Instead, she was content with a modest life: exploring the natural world, playing and singing music, and spending time with family and a few close friends. Cassidy, who at most only wanted to sing backup for other artists, often worried that financial success would taint her integrity as an artist.

Friends and family describe her as a person who placed little value on material wealth; she did not even open her first checking account until she was in her late 20s. Despite misgivings about the music business, Cassidy seemed destined to earn recognition.

In , she entered a Maryland recording studio operated by bassist Chris Biondo to record a demo with a high school friend's alternative rock band. Biondo was immediately taken by Cassidy's voice, so loud that it almost broke his sound equipment. She did these really weird, neat harmonies right on the spot, without practicing them or anything. It was amazing. After a few sessions, Biondo talked Cassidy into making her own demo tape. The two dated from until , and even after the relationship ended, the friendship continued.

Biondo, along with local booking agent Al Dale, had encouraged her to form the Eva Cassidy Band in At first, Cassidy was a reluctant performer who avoided making eye contact with the audience, but she gradually opened up after realizing how much people admired her music.

She appeared regularly at Washington-area clubs such as the Blues Alley, the Wharf, the Birchmere, , and Fleetwoods, building a strong local following. Upon seeing her in person, Brown was shocked to see that she was a petite, white female rather than a black woman.

The ultimate result of the meeting was an album of duets and ballads entitled The Other Side , first released in November of Subsequently, Biondo and Dale began shopping Cassidy's music to various record labels, but her repertoire--an eclectic mix of jazz, blues, folk, standards, gospel, and pop--scared off executives, who feared it would be difficult to market her. Cassidy and her supporters decided to self-produce an independent album, Live at Blues Alley , recorded live in January of and released that July.

The album received rave reviews by local critics and went on to become one of the best-selling records in the Washington area that year. Around the time the album was released, Cassidy developed a pain in her hip that became so severe that she sought help at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland.

Just three years prior, in , physicians removed a dark, cancerous mole from Cassidy's back and assured her that they had caught the disease in its early stages. Unfortunately, the cancer had returned. While the surgeon thought he caught all the cancer, it came back with a vengeance. Several months of heavy chemotherapy followed, to no avail. And they still turned her down. But he felt it would be ghoulish for him to attend. Six months after she died, however, he met with her parents.

Straw had the advantage of understanding the kind of specialized audience he assumed she could reach at that point. It helped that there were no other serious bidders. Though Cassidy had self-released just three albums in her lifetime — including a collaboration with DC go-go pioneer Chuck Brown, a solo work, and the live Blues Alley album — she had some recordings in the can.

From that deep trove, Blix Street fashioned an ideal set titled Songbird, which they issued in A myth has arisen that the album sold nothing until it was picked up by BBC Radio 2 two years later, but, according to Straw, the American press jumped on it quickly, with rave reviews in publications as mainstream as People magazine.

The result instantly resonated with British listeners, generating snowballing sales. Just before Christmas , after Top of the Pops 2 played a blurry video of Cassidy singing Over the Rainbow, the album soared to the top of the UK chart. In the years since, the demand for her music has encouraged the release of no fewer than 12 subsequent albums, consisting of either previously unheard or repackaged performances.

This December will see the release of yet another — a 25th anniversary edition of Live at Blues Alley. Still, he said, pressure from the public dictated that release.

He believes she would have preferred a more measured, and controllable, degree of attention. From her teens, her twin passions were music and art Georgia O'Keefe was a particular favourite , but she abandoned her visual art studies to work at a propagating plant at a nursery, which appealed to her strong, unconventional sense of spirituality.

Come the mids, still working at the nursery and having little or no ambition to pursue a career in music full-time , she went to a Maryland recording studio to sing back-up vocals on a demo for a local band. I had to go out into the parking lot and coax her to come inside. Soon, Cassidy was singing backing vocals in recording sessions for local musicians and bands.

On a visit to Biondo's studio, Al Dale, the man responsible for booking entertainment for outdoor concerts in the National Parks, heard Cassidy sing on one of her sessions. From where he was sitting, however, he couldn't see her: "I was expecting a black woman," he says in the Eva By Heart sleeve notes.

When I offered to help her with her career, she seemed astonished. An eponymous band was formed in , leading her into the inevitable quagmire of the music industry. Dale effectively became her plugger, approaching various record labels with a view to signing a contract. While a refusal to compromise undoubtedly stymied her career at this point, another reason was her eclectic repertoire, which wove its way through jazz, blues, folk, pop, gospel and standards.

Bruce Lundvall, president of Jazz and Classics for Capitol Records, reluctantly decided not to sign her to Blue Note; he later admitted that he passed on a brilliant career. Eventually giving up the hope of signing to even a moderately interested record label, Cassidy and her friends, Dale and Biondo, came to the conclusion that if the majors wouldn't come to them, then they would go to the majors.

But first, a self-produced calling card had to be made available - a recording of a live gig at Georgetown's Blues Alley in January, , was turned into Live At Blues Alley. Dale and Biondo were pleased with the results, but Cassidy wasn't and asked for the album not to be released. Eventually, a compromise was reached - the live album could be released but only if she could immediately record a studio album.

Eva By Heart was worked on when Cassidy herself knew her cancer for which she was aggressively treated was not going to disappear. Released posthumously, it is one of the few collections of recorded songs remaining by the singer. So why the immense posthumous success?