The voice that would later stop British radio listeners mid-sentence belonged to a woman who died quietly at her family home in Bowie, Maryland, on November 2, 1996. Eva Cassidy, a singer from the Washington area, was almost unknown beyond the clubs and studios of her home city. The cause was melanoma, a skin cancer that had spread to her bones and lungs with brutal speed. She was born in Washington, D.C., on February 2, 1963, and grew up in a family where music was part of the air she breathed. During her years at Bowie High School she sang with a local band called Stonehenge, learning how to hold a room before she had any thought of a career.
Songbird and the slow start
That obscurity makes what happened next feel almost impossible. Two years after her death, a small label called Blix Street Records released Songbird, a collection drawn from three albums Cassidy had already made. The record gathered songs like Fever, God Bless the Child and Over the Rainbow, the last of which became her calling card. At first, nothing much moved.
The turn came from across the Atlantic. In 2000, BBC Radio 2 began playing her songs, and British listeners responded as if they had discovered a secret. A grainy video of Cassidy singing Over the Rainbow, filmed by her friend Bryan McCall, became the most requested clip in the history of Top of the Pops 2. Songbird climbed to the top of the UK chart nearly three years after its release.
The numbers underlined how strange the story was. Songbird eventually sold 1,840,000 copies in Britain and earned a six-times platinum certification. A singer who had refused to be pinned to one genre, who sang jazz, folk, gospel and pop in the same set, had become a posthumous star. In life, that refusal had made record labels nervous; in death, it made her impossible to categorise and easy to love.
A singer who had refused to be pinned to one genre, who sang jazz, folk, gospel and pop in the same set, had become a posthumous star.
Recording on her own terms
Cassidy had spent her last years making music on her own stubborn terms. She won Washington Area Music Association awards as a jazz and traditional vocalist, and in 1994 she performed Over the Rainbow at the Wammie ceremony. But she also turned down paths that felt false to her, and she was not always happy with how she sounded on record. When she finally agreed to release Live at Blues Alley, recorded over two nights in January 1996, she did so reluctantly, on the condition that a studio song called Oh, Had I a Golden Thread be included and that work begin on a new studio album. The live recording almost did not survive its first night. A technical fault on January 2 meant only the second evening's twelve songs could be used, and the full thirty-one-song set waited nearly two decades to be heard.
That album, Eva by Heart, appeared only after her death. By then the illness had already announced itself. A malignant mole had been removed from her back in 1993. In July 1996, during a promotional event, she felt pain in her hip and assumed it was fatigue from painting murals. Tests showed a fracture and cancer in her bones and lungs. On September 17, 1996, she made her last public appearance at a benefit concert at The Bayou, closing with What a Wonderful World.
Her final performance carried no hint of farewell, just a singer doing what she had always done. Six weeks later she was gone. The posthumous success that followed rewrote the rules of what a local artist could become. Even three decades on, the machinery of rediscovery keeps turning: in 2023 an album called I Can Only Be Me, with new orchestrations by the London Symphony Orchestra, entered the UK chart at number 9. Engineers used audio restoration technology developed by Peter Jackson to lift her voice from the original recordings. After her death, her body was cremated and her ashes were scattered on the shore of a lake in St. Mary's River Watershed Park, a quiet place far from the stages she had once commanded.
None of that would have happened without the strange afterlife of Live at Blues Alley and the radio programmers who heard something in it. The live album had captured only twelve songs from the second night because of a technical fault on the first; the full thirty-one-song set stayed unreleased until 2015 as Nightbird. What began as a reluctant local release became the seed of a global reputation. Eva Cassidy did not live to see any of it, but the voice that sang Over the Rainbow in a Washington club now belongs to the world.