December 11th
Eva Cassidy-People Get Ready-Live At Pearls
1994
Ages ago-well,
much earlier this year-I wrote about Buddy Holly and pondered what would have
happened to him should he have not been tragically killed at such an early age,
and at a time when his career was on the cusp of another turn. What would have applied to Buddy Holly would
have been magnified many times with Eva Cassidy, I suppose. Her early death
leaves so much hanging in the air.
In the same way
that I discovered The White Stripes and Sparklehorse, I first heard about Eva
Cassidy through Radio 4’s news programme, “Today”. It’s not all politics and
economics. Why trudge through the hapless fools on Radio 1 when you can keep
your fingers on the cultural pulse through Radio 4? Given the choice of Tim
Westwood and “The Archers”; the world’s longest-running radio serial (“an
everyday story of country folk”), a programme that has the added extra of an
“agricultural story editor”, there’s basically no contest. Give me Radio 4 each
time.
So,“Today” ran this item on Eva Cassidy and that she was having massive
success in the U.K. on a small label due to the championing of her on Terry
Wogan’s Radio 2 breakfast show. (See, I’ve managed to get a reference to 3 of
the 4 main BBC radio stations in this piece. Just Radio 3 to go). The five
minute item really piqued my interest; it gave the (now well known)
heartbreaking story of her death due to cancer at the age of 33 and that she
never lived to see any of her recordings released internationally, let alone her
becoming a success. There also was some learned musicologist interviewed, who
explained that Eva Cassidy had that rare gift in a singer of perfect pitch and
who gave a brief explanation of what it meant. I didn’t really need to know all
that, it was interesting of course, but even through the single speaker on the
kitchen radio, you didn’t need an expert to tell you that Eva Cassidy had a
special voice.
Her singing is
so good and so way, way above anything and anyone else I’ve ever heard, that I
can put aside all the other stuff about her. It sounds really hard to say that
her early death has contributed to her commercial success, but it clearly has-
it allows an instant “angelic” myth to have developed around her. Because her
voice is so seemingly that of an angel-a voice from the heavens so to
speak-then the two have become interchangeable and untangleable. I’m sure that
she wasn’t really like that and that she was just as human as the rest of us,
but it all helps in the myth building. I can also disregard the fact that she
was popularised through Terry Wogan’s programme and the fact that many of her
songs are used willy-nilly in tearjerking TV shows to add a bit of pathos. I am
not at all bothered that Wogan’s show isn’t cutting edge. I can similarly
disregard that probably most of the people who bought Eva Cassidy’s album only
buy one record per year and don’t know the difference between Neil Young and
Carl Jung; I’m not bothered that Eva Cassidy’s albums nestle close to Crass on
my shelves and that the few tracks she recorded have been endlessly repackaged over
and over again after her death. The only thing that matters to me is that
voice. She could be singing a shopping list in Serbo-Croat or the price list
from the wall in Gregg’s and it would still sound, for the want of any other
word, beautiful.
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