QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Updated October 20, 2004
Website Navigation
- Welcome Page
- "What's New" Page
- Eva's Recordings
- Articles about Eva
- Exclusive Interviews
- Pictures
- More Eva Sites
- Miscellaneous
- Questions and Answers
- Songbird book information
- Guestbook
- This month's poll
Special links to Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk (a small percentage of the sales will be donated to melanoma research):
This page will contain answers to the most frequently asked questions about Eva Cassidy, as well as some others that might be of general interest. The information is correct and may be relied upon. Where applicable, I will include the source. For further information, read the Fact Sheet about Eva and consider ordering the biographical book about Eva, Songbird. To learn more about "Eva's Favorites," visit the "Eva's Birthday Page." At the bottom of this page, there is a listing of "frequent errors" I have seen in print!
Answer: No. Eva is not here to give "official" status to ANY websites, and therefore I consider any and all Eva Cassidy-related websites, including this one, to be "unofficial."
Answer: Click here for the complete listing.
Answer: Click here for some suggestions.
ANSWER: The same way Eva got them, by listening over and over again! She found most of her material on recordings from other artists, then made the songs her own. There are also a a couple of Eva songbooks. For more information about those, visit the "Lyrics and Songbooks page." For lyrics, I highly recommend the "Eva Songs" website which offers complete lyrics to all the songs on all the Eva albums.
According to Chris Biondo, the Eva Cassidy Band did play for a few large crowds. They opened for the Neville Brothers at the Filene Center at Wolf Trap Farm Park, they played at "Taste of DC" right after Little Feat (therefore the audience was large), and they played for thousands at the Columbia Arts Festival, with Chuck Brown. Eva's solo performances were for comparatively small audiences, which Eva preferred.
ANSWER: It's a suburb of Washington, DC, a few miles east of the city. By the way, it is pronounced Bowie like the knife, to rhyme with gooey or Lewie, not Bowie like the singer David Bowie, whose name rhymes with showy or doughy or Joey.
ANSWER: No and no. She was not in a romantic relationship at the time of her final illness. The romance between Eva and her producer/bassist, Chris Biondo, had ended a few years previously, but they continued to be friends and musical collaborators.
ANSWER: Eva Marie Cassidy was born at Washington Hospital Center in Washington, DC, on February 2, 1963, at 10 PM. (Source: her mother)
ANSWER: Eva rhymes with "diva." In other words, it's EVE-ah, not Ava. She was named for her paternal great-grandmother, Eva McGrew.
ANSWER: Yes, she performed in Iceland. Eva's violinist brother Dan Cassidy lives in Iceland and Eva performed with him there. Her maternal grandparents lived in Bad Kreuznach, Germany, and although she visited she didn't perform there. According to Eva's mother, she brought her guitar on a holiday in Greece and played and sang there informally.
ANSWER: From Keith Grimes, the lead guitarist of the Eva Cassidy Band, came this reply: "Eva's acoustic/electric steel-stringed guitar was a Guild Songbird, appropriately enough. Its thinner-than-usual body size suited the not-large Eva, so it was physically comfortable to hold all night. The solid body electric she used was a Fender Stratocaster belonging to Chris. She played the Guild straight through the P.A., while the Strat went through a Roland JC-120 amp which also belonged to Chris. On 'Over the Rainbow' she played a Gibson 'Chet Atkins' model, an electric/acoustic guitar with nylon strings. Most of the stuff she did with the the band was steel-stringed. She never used a pick, she always used her fingers for everything. I hope people aren't going to go out and get whatever Eva had; Eva was using what she could afford. She did get a good sound out of the instruments she used." For more information about Eva's guitars, read the interview with Mike Dove on the "Interviews" page.
ANSWER: From Chris Biondo: "No. We worked really hard on it but we didn't think it was very good, at the time. I remember the day we finished it, it was July 18, 1992. We were really tired when we finished it. It was just Eva and I, we didn't think it was very good, Chuck Brown called and we said 'Come on over, we want you to come to a party with us,' we went over to a friend of Eva's and had a jam session in the basement.... Eva had been singing that song for years, she had already recorded it once when she was in high school. I remember we were driving to Ikea Furniture one day, she pulled out a cassette and she wanted me to hear 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow.' And when we'd go places she would sing it in the car. A couple of times I had to pull over I was crying so hard, it was brutal. I'm immune to it by now though. People used to ask to hear that song a lot. The hard part for her wasn't singing it, it was playing the guitar part all the way through without making any mistakes. It was all her own version. There was a note she changed that was really good, the word 'far,' she changed the note, it's better than the way Judy Garland sang it." For more information, read my article about "Over the Rainbow."
Answer: No, Eva never met Sting. You have to remember that she was very, very unknown during her lifetime. The only times she was heard outside the Washington DC area were when she was performing with her brother Dan in Iceland, and on a brief U.S. tour with "Pieces of a Dream." She didn't move in the musical circles that would introduce her to somebody like Sting.
Years after Eva's death, Sting did hear her recording of the song. In the article "Robin Young: Forever Catching Fireflies in a Bottle" by Laura Bernieri, we learn that "Robin was able to get Sting to listen to Eva’s rendition of 'Fields of Gold.' She has him on camera saying that he was quite territorial about that song, arrogant even, only to be brought to tears by her totally different vocal interpretation." Robin Young is exploring the possibility of producing a documentary about Eva in the future.
Sting gave this statement to Richard Harrington of the Washington Post, who kindly gave me permission to reproduce it here: "A friend of Eva's sent me the recording after her death, I thought it was a beautiful rendition. I've rarely heard a voice of such purity. I was deeply sorry to learn of her death and somehow it gave the song another emotional level. I was very happy the work saw the light of day. It's an extraordinary success."
Here's another Sting quote about Eva: "I heard this voice and it was so beautiful, so pure. And the next thing I hear, it's almost a year later, and Terry Wogan is playing it on Radio 2. Then lo and behold, it's number 1 in England and I'm happy for her. Even though it's a sad tragic story, it has kind of a poetry about it."
One more Sting quote: "Blue Skies Chris" in the UK writes, 'I found an article in a magazine with a transcription of an interview done by David Jensen, a Radio DJ on Capital Gold (an Independent London station playing "old" music). The following is an excerpt that may interest you:-
DJ: Eva Cassidy sang Fields of Gold. As a songwriter, it must be the greatest compliment when others want to sing your songs?
Sting: I remember being sent this song by a friend of hers - it was long before the success - and she explained how her friend had died and how she would have loved me to hear the song. I was almost in tears because it's such a beautiful version. It then became this huge hit, but I was saddened that she didn't live to see her success. I was proud to be the writer of the song. It's a song about continuity and having romantic love turn into something more romantic and more mellow.'
See also my article about "Fields of Gold."
Answer: Eva had melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. A few years before she died she had had a malignant tumor removed from her back, but it didn't worry her (unfortunately) and nobody thought any more about it. Around the time LIVE AT BLUES ALLEY was recorded, she was able to quit her "day job" at a landscape nursery and devote herself mostly-full-time to her music. In addition she worked with another artist to paint murals on the walls of elementary school cafeterias. When her hip started to hurt, she attributed it to spending too much time on stepladders. She began to walk with a cane and sat more than she stood when she performed. Finally she got X-rayed and it turned out that the hip was broken. The cancer had returned and spread throughout her bones. Though the prognosis looked poor, she began aggressive chemotherapy at Johns Hopkins (one of the best cancer centers in this country). I don't believe she performed again after she began the chemotherapy, except to sing "What a Wonderful World" at the tribute concert a few weeks before she died. We were glad that she was able to stay at home (her parents' house) for her entire illness.
ANSWER: Eva's grandmother, Clara Cassidy, considered herself a "late bloomer" because she waited until she retired at age 65 to pursue her lifelong dream as a writer. She became a newspaper columnist who wrote wise and witty essays of advice on retirement and aging. Many of these columns were collected into self-published booklets which were advertised in her newspaper column; people would write to her to buy them. But some were distributed in other ways. I have seen some of her essay collections through Internet book-find services such as Bibliofind and Advanced Book Exchange. She also wrote two children's books that were published as Little Golden Books, and one of them, WE LIKE KINDERGARTEN, was reprinted for many years. At some point I would like to reproduce some of her essays on my website. Many of them are illustrated with Eva's drawings. Some titles to look for are "Up In Years (...and off my rocker)," "Still Off My Rocker," and "Stay Off That Rocker." Others are "Living The Topmost Years," "How to Create a Braided Rug," and "I Remember, Do You?"
Answer: In 2004, Eva's sisters Anette and Margret created a website at www.evacassidy.com to showcase Eva's artwork. A limited-edition print of one of Eva's drawings, "The Boy in the Nest," is currently available through that site, and more prints will be offered beginning in late 2004.
Answer: No, the video is not for sale. As far as I know there are no plans to release more excerpts. If this situation changes I'll post it on my website; I'd love to see a LIVE AT BLUES ALLEY expanded release on DVD, wouldn't you? For those of you who are curious to know more about the history of the video clip, Eva's friend Bryan McCulley videotaped Eva at Blues Alley in 1996, the same night the live album was recorded. He says, "It was never shot to be shown as a music video, but hey, it's all we've got. It is pretty decent footage though. I wanted to document the making of the Blues Alley CD, so that's why I went out and videoed it. It would make great documentary footage." The master tape from the recording session was synched up with the video for better sound quality. When the clip was shown on "Tops of the Pops 2" for the second time, the caption stated that it was the "most requested clip in TOTP2 history"! In 2002, some additional video clips from Blues Alley were shown on television in Europe and Australia: "Cheek to Cheek," "You've Changed," and "Time After Time."
Answer: I asked Chris about this. He said that Eva did record her solo guitar-accompanied version of "Over the Rainbow" in the studio. (I haven't heard this one myself.) He doesn't think Eva would want the Blues Alley rendition on an album because her voice cracks at the end. But Chris doesn't make the decisions about any forthcoming albums -- that's in the hands of the record company. The version of "Over the Rainbow" that is available on THE OTHER SIDE and SONGBIRD CDs is a studio recording made several years earlier than the video. It is Eva's own arrangement.
**UPDATE February 2002: Hot Records in the UK is releasing a "CD single" of "People Get Ready" that also includes the Blues Alley solo version of "Over the Rainbow." It was recorded at Blues Alley the same night as the live album, and is the "soundtrack" for the now-famous OTR video clip.
Answer: Eva didn't actually write much poetry and didn't consider herself a poet. The "Springtime" poem was written for a friend, and the first part of the poem contains mostly personal references, for instance to her friend's dog and cat. The second part of the poem is the only section that will be published.
Answer: Oh, wasn't that a teaser! Unfortunately, "Amazing Grace" isn't on any of the albums and I don't believe Eva ever recorded it.
Answer: Chris Biondo says he never heard her sing any Grateful Dead songs. Someone has pointed out that the Grateful Dead have a recording of "Early Morning Rain," but I think Eva would have considered that a Gordon Lightfoot song.
Answer: Again according to Chris Biondo, she didn't record it, and he never heard her sing it.
Answer: The answer comes from Lenny Williams, the keyboardist for the Eva Cassidy Band. Lenny has "perfect pitch" and was therefore considered best-qualified to make this determination. My thanks to Eileen White, who researched this one and wrote it up as follows:
'I cornered Lenny tonight in search of an answer to the Eva's Highest Note question. And the winner is... the Mother's Day Rap, "This Is For My Mother." Here are the details:
-- "How Can I Keep From Singing": High note is A5 (A below high C).
-- "Golden Thread": High note is also A5.
-- "God Bless the Child": High note ("Papa") is another A5.
-- Niki Lee Song "November": Eva is singing alto on Niki's song, but she hits some high notes also. The highest is an A5.
-- "This Is For My Mother": High note is E6, the E above high C. Amazing. Lenny said this is in "Minnie Riperton range."
Lenny also said that the A's are full voice, while the E is falsetto.'
Note : the high notes are at the end of the rap song and aren't on the audio clip. Sorry!
Answer: From Chris Biondo - "No, she didn't." Perfect pitch, also called absolute pitch, is the rare ability to identify a musical note without reference to another note.
Answer: Eva's ashes were scattered at a favorite spot near the Chesapeake Bay, at a friend's property in St. Mary's County, Maryland.
Answer: She wasn't a songwriter. She once told me that she had tried but her songs weren't any good. Of course she didn't think she was a very good guitar player either, and she was great, so I wish I had heard some of those songs.
Answer: It made me cry, but I loved it. I decided not to put an official review on my website because I realized that my reaction to the book is going to be very different from that of people who didn't know Eva. For me, it was like looking through a family scrapbook -- "Wasn't Uncle Hugh handsome?" and "That photo was taken at our house at Christmas" and "I'd forgotten all about Eva's boyfriend Thurston!" For more information about the book, by the way, follow this link. The book doesn't go into much detail about Eva's recordings, which seems like an odd omission, but the many in-depth articles on this website can fill the gap.
Answer: Eva wasn't a churchgoer but I think of her as a spiritual person. Her choice of music tells a lot about her beliefs, wouldn't you agree?
Answer: Chris Biondo says "Dark End of the Street" was brought in by Keith Grimes, and Eva was doing it before "The Commitments" came out. It's on the album THE OTHER SIDE, and some editions of EVA BY HEART.
Answer: Eva's father and my mother are brother and sister, so Eva was my first cousin. Eva was three years younger than me. We played together a lot as children but didn't see each other often as adults, just at family get-togethers and whenever I'd go to hear her sing.
When I started the website in early 1999, it was hard to get information about Eva Cassidy. She was very obscure but the people who heard her music tended to become instant fanatics. There were a few good articles about her that were available on the Internet, and I wanted to help the people who wanted to know more about Eva. In a way, it was something I could do for Eva; it was a labor of love. Since then, Eva's fame has grown, and the website has grown too. I am especially proud of the interviews and articles I have done especially for the website. For the first three years, the site occupied the 1 MB "personal web space" that came with our family ISP account. In February, 2002, I moved the site to a new server using the domain name EVACASSIDY.ORG. Now that I have more space available, I plan to add more photos and examples of Eva's artwork. I'm not a journalist or a web designer -- it's a totally amateur effort, I do the coding by hand without any special software. Jefferson Morley wrote a little article about me and the website in the Washington Post Magazine in June, 2001. See also the "Contact the Webmaster" page.
Answer: I had to do some research to find out for sure, but Eva never recorded this song. There is a Jackson Brown/Jennifer Warnes duet of this song, and in at least one place on the Internet, the female singer is misidentified as Eva. It isn't. Sorry! Chris Biondo says that Eva always intended to record "Golden Slumbers," possibly in a medley with "Across the Universe," but they never got around to it.
Answer: I asked him. It turns out that "Waly Waly," "I Know You By Heart," "American Tune," "Anniversary Song," and "Time After Time" are Chris's top five, in no particular order, except that "Waly Waly" is #1. "Especially the second verse, the verse about the boat," he said. Chris says that over the years he has become "immune" to "Over the Rainbow."
Answer: "Live at Pearl's" is a tape made at Pearl's Restaurant in Annapolis, Maryland, in the fall of 1994. Eva was playing there as a solo performer. On two occasions, her friend Bryan McCulley brought his video equipment, plugged it into Eva's sound board, and recorded the performance. On the first of these nights, the video part of his equipment malfunctioned and only the audio track was recorded. Bryan later transferred this to cassette. Eva's friend Maggie Haven remembers that Eva played this tape for her and the other artists when they were painting murals on the walls of an elementary school cafeteria!
After Eva's death, copies of this cassette tape circulated among her friends and family. Later, some of these tracks were included in the albums IMAGINE and AMERICAN TUNE. Some of Eva's fans have been sharing copies of the "Pearl's" tracks (several generations of copying away from the original). These copies definitely fall in the category of "bootlegs" and I do not endorse such distribution. Personally, I would be thrilled if eventually a full LIVE AT PEARL'S album is created, so that Eva's fans can share in the vocal magic Eva created that night, legally and morally and with the best sound possible. In the meantime, I feel that people who are distributing bootleg recordings of any artist, including Eva Cassidy, are essentially stealing something that is valuable and does not belong to them. My biggest concern is that if all Eva's fans have bootleg copies of this material, it will be increasingly less likely that a PEARL'S album would ever be legally produced.
Message from the webmaster : I've found a great deal of misinformation about Eva in various places. Here are a few corrections I feel the need to make, for one reason or another. Journalists, take note! If you reproduce these mistakes, you haven't been doing your homework:
- This is my "pet peeve": EVA DID HAVE HEALTH INSURANCE! When she left her job at Behnkes Nursery she joined the musicians union (D.C. Federation of Musicians, Local 161-710), and signed up for group medical insurance through the union. I feel it is important to mention this because it is one of the many excellent reasons for musicians without "day jobs" with benefits to join their local unions. The issue of health insurance must seem odd to people outside the United States, but regrettably it is a Big Deal here (source: Cassidy family)
- Eva didn't cash in her mortgage to make LIVE AT BLUES ALLEY; she never had a mortgage. She did borrow against her credit cards (source: Cassidy family, and Chris Biondo)
- The correct name of Eva's producer/bassist is Chris Biondo, *not* Biondi. His father is a retired civil servant, not a lawyer. (source: Chris Biondo)
- Eva's brother Dan is no more a "folk fiddler" than Eva was a "folk singer" -- like his sister, he enjoys a range of musical styles, including jazz. In no sense could he be considered to be part of the "egotistical world of the music industry" (in Iceland?!?) (source: personal knowledge)
- To the best of my knowledge, Eva didn't sing any of Elton John's music
- Eva was NOT "dying" when she recorded LIVE AT BLUES ALLEY. None of the songs on any of the albums were recorded after the cancer was diagnosed (source: Chris Biondo)
- Hugh Cassidy, Eva's father, was not a music teacher except within his family. Now retired, he taught "special education" students in the local public schools (source: Cassidy family)
- I am Eva's cousin, not her aunt. My mother is Eva's Aunt Isabel (source: personal knowledge)
- The recording of "Over the Rainbow" on the SONGBIRD CD is *not* the same rendition as the video recently seen on "TOTP2." Eva's studio recording is on the albums, and the video was taken at Blues Alley, the same night the live album was taped (see above about a CD single, however)
- The "Over the Rainbow" video clip is *not* the only video footage ever made of Eva performing (though it is much better quality than any of the other videos I have seen). See above for more information (source: personal knowledge)
- I have it on very good authority that Eric Clapton's singing of "Over the Rainbow" in London was *not* a tribute to Eva Cassidy. It was evidently "Judy's version" and he performed it for personal reasons unrelated to Eva. There's no reason to believe that Clapton has even heard of Eva Cassidy (source: a relative of Mr. Clapton)
- Eva had two sisters, Anette and Margret, as well as her violinist brother Dan (source: personal knowledge)
- When Eva came to the tribute concert at the Bayou nightclub in Washington, DC (not at Blues Alley), she used a walker. Weak as Eva was, she did not have to be carried. And she wore a rather elegant cap on her head, not a bandana (as viewers of the 2001 Today Show segment can confirm) (source: personal observation)
- A correction from Eva's father: The face of the angel sculpture is not clay, it is aluminum that was recycled from soda cans. He says he sculpted it in clay and made a cast in aluminum (source: Hugh Cassidy)
- The Eva Cassidy Band was not a regular act at Blues Alley. They were delighted to be booked to perform there several times, however (source: Chris Biondo)
- Even in the Washington DC area, Eva was *not* well-known to the public before the flurry of publicity connected with her illness and death. On many occasions I would go to hear her perform and see mostly-empty tables. Guitarist Keith Grimes once observes, "We were beyond obscure." I know this is hard for you to believe! The lesson here is to GET OUT THERE AND HEAR LIVE MUSIC! Not just the big international acts, go to the folk coffeehouses and the dingy little bars and clubs, and see what talent is out there undiscovered. Tell them that Eva Cassidy sent you! As Jeff D. wrote in the guestbook, "The fact that you won't hear another Eva Cassidy shouldn't deter you -- there has never been another Eva Cassidy -- but there will be someone else."
Copyright 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 - Laura Claire Bligh. All rights reserved.
