Annapolis honors singer Eva Cassidy with mural
ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) — Eva Cassidy may be the most famous musical artist to ever live in Annapolis, but it took 26 years and a mural dedication for the city to mount a tribute concert in her honor.
Cassidy died in 1996 of metastatic melanoma. She was 33, beloved locally, with one solo album and countless gigs at Annapolis bars to her name. That album, "Live at Blues Alley," has since sold more than 12 million copies, landing atop record sales charts around the world. No other artist who spent her recording career in the Washington area has enjoyed that level of success, with the obvious caveat that Cassidy did not live to see it.
"That's the thing about Eva: All of her success was posthumous," said fan Doug Gibson, who attended the recent dedication along with his girlfriend, an artist who knew Eva Cassidy through Annapolis art circles.
Acquaintances, coworkers, friends, family, bandmates, roommates and even ex-boyfriends all were among the crowd of several hundred who attended the official dedication of "Maryland Songbird," a portrait of Eva Cassidy painted on the rear of a Cathedral Street building in Annapolis. The mural, created by artists Jeff Huntington and Julia Gibb with help from local students and supported by their nonprofit Future History Now, is best viewed in the parking lot of Stan and Joe's Saloon on West Street.
"We're going to start calling it the Eva Cassidy Lot," quipped Joe McGovern, one of the saloon's proprietors. "Not the Eva Cassidy Parking Lot."
It took Huntington seven years to get all the necessary approvals and funding for the project, the artist said, but there was never any question that Cassidy was the former Annapolis resident who would be memorialized on the wall.
More than 30 musicians performed at a tribute concert in the Eva Cassidy Lot. No one was more mobbed by fans than cellist Hugh "Fitz" Cassidy, Eva's father, who joined local bluegrass outfit The Befuddlers to play a quartet of songs recorded by his daughter: "Over the Rainbow," "Autumn Leaves," "Fine and Mellow" and "Wade in the Water."
The Befuddlers rehearsed for the gig at Hugh and Barbara Cassidy's home in Shadyside, a waterfront retreat the couple considers "a gift from Eva," since they built it with royalties from her recordings. Singer and upright bass player Jenn Byrne said she has always felt welcome there and struggled to get through "Over the Rainbow" without crying. Her voice would crack, an affect that Eva Cassidy, a perfectionist for a pure vocal line, would have hated.
"I would just look over at Hugh and think, 'How can he do this?" Byrne said. Yet they did. Hugh, 86, and Barbara, 83, could be smiling nearly all afternoon.
Hugh Cassidy joined the Befuddlers with a five-string electric cello that he retrofitted himself. He frequently glanced over to follow the fingers of Larry Melton, an electric bass player who was one of Eva's close friends and collaborators. For years, Byrne said, the band always has avoided playing what she calls "the Eva stuff," around 30 American songbook standards and contemporary pop songs that Eva Cassidy covered at her concerts.
"Cassidy was not a writer but an interpreter," former Washington Post music critic Richard Harrington wrote in an appreciation. "If a song did not capture her soul, Cassidy knew she would not be able to move others singing it."
"The Bowie blues diva," as Washington City Paper called her, phrased lyrics with an aching sincerity that placed her alongside the famous original recording artists: Judy Garland, John Lennon, Sting. Not bad for a soprano accustomed to at times playing for 10 people in Annapolis bars.
Anita Hagan recalled being in one such small crowd around 1993 in the basement of Reynold's Tavern in Annapolis. She was sitting in the dark listening when a group of guys came in, turned the lights on and started throwing darts. The singer did nothing to deter them.
"She wouldn't do that," Hagan said. "So I did."
It's a shame, but Hagan knows Cassidy drew slightly larger crowds at gigs farther out of town, including Shootz, a billiards hall in Bethesda, and Fleetwood's in Alexandria, a restaurant owned by Fleetwood Mac's Mick Fleetwood. Eva Cassidy's longest 10 seconds of living fame came in 1992, when she recorded a series of duets with Chuck Brown, Washington's "father of Go-go" called "The Other Side." But while area musicians recognized her genre-crossing talent, the record industry did not, and Eva Cassidy wasn't interested in letting executives make decisions about her music.
She had, in Harrington's words, an "instinctive disdain for commercial compromise."
That iconoclast spirit likely came from Barbara, a German immigrant, and Hugh, whose vocations include music, metalsmithing and professional weightlifting. The family moved to Bowie from Oxon Hill in 1972. Son Dan became a professional fiddler, but their daughter had no formal musical training, opting to take art classes at Prince George's Community College. Cassidy's non-musical jobs included painting furniture for a company in Annapolis and tending plants at a nursery in Beltsville.
She lived, for a time, near Maryland Hall in Annapolis. At some point, she took a handful of voice lessons with a trained vocal coach in Washington, Barbara recalled, but was told, "You don't need lessons. Just keep doing what you are doing." So she did, gigging away but never gaining fame.
Perhaps appropriately, Huntington, McGovern and other organizers did little outreach for the event, allowing Facebook posts and word of mouth to draw a crowd that would fit in the lot, along with cameras for the Irish filmmaker working on a documentary. "Cassidy Family Dedication," was written on the chalkboard at Stan and Joe's.
Family members have attended several events in Eva's honor, Hugh Cassidy said, but nothing like this one.
"In Annapolis, this it the biggest deal," he said, "and the best."
"This is more joyful," Barbara added, noting that one of Eva's friends was surprised by the gathering's celebratory tone. That friend, she said, "is still having to deal with the grief." As are so many of the artist's fans.
In May of 1996, Eva Cassidy showed up at a release party for "Live at Blues Alley" walking with a cane. She had recently fallen while painting a mural and blamed the spill on a hip injury. Within three months, the singer would be diagnosed with melanoma so advanced it had already spread to her bones. She died Nov. 2.
Byrne vividly remembered the day of Cassidy's funeral. She had recently moved back to Annapolis and run into mutual friends who attended the service. Still tearful, they handed her a copy of "Live at Blues Alley." Cassidy and her band recorded the album at the 124-seat Georgetown venue less than a year before. The singer ordered only a thousand copies, and was convinced she'd "have boxes and boxes of them lying around forever," her co-producer and former boyfriend Chris Biondo told The Washington Post.
Shortly after Cassidy died, Grace Griffith, a folk and Celtic singer from La Plata, arranged a meeting between Hugh, Barbara and the CEO of a small record label in Washington State. Blix Street, they all agreed, was the right fit. In 1998, Blix released "Songbird," featuring mostly recordings from Biondo's Montgomery County studio and re-released "Blues Alley."
Both albums would take off in Europe before gaining traction in the United States. To this day, Barbara believes that's not because Americans have poor taste, but because smart producers at publicly funded broadcasters overseas have more autonomy than those at American commercial radio stations.
"They let the DJs choose the music," Barbara Cassidy said.
A BBC radio host began spinning Cassidy's covers of "Fields of Gold" and "Over the Rainbow," the latter of which was included on a 1999 "BBC Songs of the Century" compilation. A bootleg video became the most requested ever on BBC-TV's "Top of the Pops." Yet it took a few years for Cassidy's music to boomerang back across the Atlantic. Then, in 2002, American world champion figure skater Michelle Kwan took to the ice for the exhibition program at the Salt Lake City Olympics. Kwan had been expected to win the gold medal that year but had only taken the bronze. She appeared in a Vera Wang dress and skated a devastating program to Cassidy's "Fields of Gold."
"Tears of joy, tears of sadness and more than a little irony," commentator Dick Button said as Kwan completed her final spin.
That performance marked the first time their Cassidy's music was played on national television, her parents said. Kwan made "Fields of Gold" her signature performance, and when a skating tour stopped in Washington, Kwan invited the singer's parents and arranged to meet them, Barbara Cassidy recalled.
In 2003, Cassidy's cover of Fleetwood Mac's "Songbird" made the soundtrack of the hit film "Love Actually." Slowly, more of her music seeped into the American cultural consciousness. Cassidy's cousin Laura, who attended the tribute concert, maintains an online list of celebrity fans. On "The Voice," judge Kelly Clarkson recently praised a contestant as "Eva-esque," expecting viewers to know her on a first-name basis.
Miyuki Williams, a host at WPFW-89.3FM, Washington's "Jazz and Justice" public radio station, proudly related that anecdote. She periodically invites Hugh and Barbara Cassidy to be her guests. Those shows draw more responses from fans than anything else Williams does at the station.
"Their emails are full of gratitude and grace," Williams said from the stage between acts. "The phone calls are passionate, often spoken through tears. Whether it's a triumph of her enormous talent or the tragedy of her life far too short, the listeners are deeply moved."
Other speakers were just as heartfelt. Brian Cahalan, owner of 49 West Coffeehouse, Wine Bar and Gallery regretted that while he heard Eva play at the tavern around the corner, he didn't get a babysitter to attend the Blues Alley show in Washington.
"And then she was gone," Cahalan said.
But now, every day, he can look at the Future History Now mural, and see a portrait of his blonde friend, long hair falling forward, fingers strumming her guitar. Other passers-by may see the black-and-white portrait and be introduced to "Maryland's Songbird" for the first time.
"There are still people in Annapolis who have never heard of Eva Cassidy," Byrne said, "but once they listen, they will never forget."
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