“I introduced you to our Eva,” my good friend said, and I felt a brief flash of jealousy and wonder, having forgotten the truth in that. I then remembered standing on a ladder over her toilet, reaching to her bathroom ceiling to repair loosened wallpaper. In the background of the second floor of her house, music played, and I heard a song. At its end, I said, “That is the most beautiful rendition of ‘Over The Rainbow’ I have ever heard.”
On that day I became enamored of a dead singer, whose brief bright flame across the musical sky burned out in 1996, when she was 33. When I was playing her music in the home of another friend, I asked a listener if he knew her music. “Oh yes,” he said. “She used to play at Blues Alley, which is near me.” Regret flared and died in me, but there was nothing I could have done differently. She was little known when she was alive, and she died from the effects of melanoma long before I heard of her.
One of her songs is called “The Water Is Wide.” A friend once sang it to me, claiming that it was of Native American origin. I did not know that a professional musician had recorded the song until I heard Eva sing it; I also did not know of its connection to a 1974 movie that I had discovered in 1987. I loved the movie “Conrack,” starring Jon Voight, and later learned that it was based on a memoir by Pat Conroy. “The Water Is Wide” was one of the few books by Conroy that I had not read at that time. (I’ve since caught up.)
Eva Cassidy produced nine albums in her musical life and I have all but two of them on CD. They are not all classified in the same way by the music gods: Some are pop, some are blues, some are considered jazz. I do not love them all, but I do love her body of work, and her voice. She covered Sting’s “Fields Of Gold,” and I have two versions of that song. One version is from a live performance at Blues Alley, the other is a studio production. The live version cannot be distinguished from the studio; her delivery is the same on both. In a bar recently, I heard Dolly Parton sing from a jukebox. The words, “coat of many colors,” brought to mind Eva’s song of that name and I thought Cassidy sang it much better.
Eva Cassidy was born in Bowie, Maryland, which is near the Washington DC area. She was not a songwriter, but for me, her interpretations of songs were more than worthy of the originals, including “True Colors,” and “Time After Time.”
I asked of one friend that she share one of Cassidy’s songs with a couple of our acquaintance and love, but she did not. We did not discuss why she failed to do so, but in the end, I think that it was providence that kept that sharing away.
For me, “Anniversary Song” reaches into the heart, and puts words to emotions that might only be experienced in the most oblique way. The song speaks of the comfort and wonder in having grown old with a mate, and asks of a musician, in honor of that “special day,” to “play your piano.” I sat with my friend until he died, and for his wife, who lost her great good love, I was astonished by ending of the song:
“I love you, and goodnight.”