There’s A Difference Between Honoring A Dead Artist And Exploiting One

Another new album of old Eva Cassidy recordings, called Jazzed, is about to come out. Cassidy, a peerless D.C. songbird, died 30 years ago next month. Her supply of unheard material ran out long ago. So those who legally control Cassidy’s songbook transitioned from merely curating her art, as her label still claims to be doing with the latest project, to altering it. Jazzed gave me the blues.

Cassidy’s talent was rare and huge, though it took her dying to get the music industry to notice. And the story of her quiet, relatively anonymous life giving way to massive posthumous popularity the world over is equally amazing. When she was alive and singing, Cassidy was unknown outside the D.C. area, where she was born and raised and stayed until the end. She really wasn’t a big draw in her hometown, either. She had a small, hardcore group of local fans who loved her for her pitch-perfect voice and multi-genre musical range, and also for being a serene, sweet soul seemingly as oblivious to her own artistic genius as were all the record-label honchos who rejected her when she was knocking on doors looking for a deal. She paid her bills by working at a plant nursery, not by making beautiful music. Cassidy and her band gigged mostly at bars, never at theaters or music halls. She financed her own recordings, including 1996’s Live at Blues Alley, the only solo album she lived to see released. 

But right when that record was about to come out, Cassidy began telling friends she wasn’t feeling right, and died from melanoma mere months later. Some Cassidy recordings got into the hands of pop influencers in England in the late 1990s, most notably her cover of “Over the Rainbow,” and over the next few years she became a phenomenon throughout Europe and then the world. Another big break came when Team USA’s Michelle Kwan skated to Cassidy’s version of “Fields of Gold” on the way to a bronze medal during the 2002 Olympics.