Eva Cassidy

Eva Cassidy spent her short life as one of Washington, D.C.'s best-kept secrets. Born on February 2, 1963, she sang jazz, folk and blues in a soprano that could go from a whisper to full power in a single phrase, and she played guitar and piano too. Her first album, The Other Side, in 1992, was a set of duets with go-go man Chuck Brown, and Live at Blues Alley followed in 1996. The Washington Area Music Association honored her, but outside her hometown hardly anybody knew her name when she died of melanoma on November 2, 1996, at 33.

Then came one of music's stranger second acts. Two years later her takes on "Fields of Gold" and "Over the Rainbow" got airplay from Mike Harding and Terry Wogan at BBC Radio 2, British listeners flooded in, and a friend's camcorder footage of her singing "Over the Rainbow" at Blues Alley aired on Top of the Pops 2. Songbird, a compilation that had been out for nearly three years, suddenly shot to number one in the UK.

Her posthumous records have since sold more than ten million copies, with three number-one albums and a number-one single in the UK, and nine albums in all have been released since her death, the latest, I Can Only Be Me, a 2023 collaboration with the London Symphony Orchestra. Blix Street Records has been her label.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.