This song is a variant of the Scottish folk song “The Water is Wide” (which Eva also recorded). The version on the album EVA BY HEART was done in the studio. “It was one of the last things she did, before she was too sick to sing anymore,” Chris Biondo says. He discusses the song at some length in the 1999 interview, “The Making of the album EVA BY HEART,” in which he recalls,
‘She recorded it with a click track, with a drone note — you can pretty much sing the song around a pedal point note. She wanted it to be orchestrated. She tried playing strings on the keyboard on it, we had Lenny [Williams] try the piano on it, but it wasn’t the way she wanted it yet. After Eva died, I wanted it to be on the album but I didn’t know what to do with it.
What we finally did was, I took the vocals off the tape. The vocals were in two parts, the first she had done maybe six months before, the second she had done when were finishing up LIVE AT BLUES ALLEY. I gave the two parts to Lenny and said “Do something with this.” The music that’s on the album, he did at his house on his computer, and we brought it back to the studio and put it all together. He worked really hard on it. I told him what I wanted him to do, to put down a very simple piano and use things like the low celtic drum and the cymbal swells and the strings, he put that together with his tape recorder and we recorded it back on the big tape and got the vocals all synced up. I really liked what Lenny did with it, my gut feeling is that he got it exactly as she would have liked it.’
According to Biondo, the only time Eva performed “Waly Waly” live was the second night of the Blues Alley recording sessions. “She had worked with Lenny on that in the studio, a little bit, she showed him the chord progressions, and that night at Blues Alley she said to him, ‘Do you want to try to do this?’ They went over it there on stage before the audience was let in, and decided they’d roll the dice and give it a try.” It was unusual for them to perform something that hadn’t been thoroughly rehearsed. “When they came off stage after the set, they were both shaking their heads, saying it was a mistake, it wasn’t ready.” Lenny Williams confirms, “That’s exactly what we said.”
Over 25 years later, however, the vocal track from that live Blues Alley performance of “Waly Waly” was separated out with the assistance of Artificial Intelligence, and the London Symphony Orchestra joined Eva’s singing for the album I CAN ONLY BE ME. Biondo believes Eva would have been thrilled and honored to be in collaboration with a full orchestra. But he wishes Eva’s other recording of “Waly Waly” had been used.
LYRICS (public domain):
When cockleshells
Turn to silvery bells
Then will my love return to me
When roses bloom
In the wintery snow
Then will my love return to me
Oh waly waly
Love be bonnie
And bright as a jewel
When it’s first new
But love grows old
And waxes cold
And fades away like morning dew
There is a ship
It’s sailing the sea
It’s loaded high and deep can be
But not so deep
As my love for you
I know not if I’ll sink or swim
Oh waly waly
Love be bonnie
And bright as a jewel
When it’s first new
But love grows old
And waxes cold
And fades away like morning dew