Over 16,528,902 people are on fubar.
What are you waiting for?
At a time when I was in the midst of my own music career on the local and regional level, I happened across another working musician/singer in DC area, one of many that I stopped to listen to in passing.
The difference in this shy mellow young lady, was she had it,... the gift, or whatever name you choose to call "it". Her it was the opposite of mine, where me being a rock/metal musician, the it was the roar of emotion & the electricity coming from a crowd giving back what you are making them feel.
Her it was her ability to hush a crowded busy room, not with her stage presense, her looks or moves, but merely the first three angelic notes that eminated from this little body. There was no bustle of convos in the background, no reckless clinking of glassware, even the most blowhard obnoxious drunks were silenced without being confronted, the only intervention being that voice. A Siren if you believe such a thing.
Eva made quite the impression, the one where I immediately recognized that she wasnt where she belonged, and that I would no doubt see her again without having to look for her, because the next time she would be brought to me through her own notoriety.
Such wasnt the case, not because it wasnt recognized, it was inevitable that word would get out, and soon record labels came from near and far sniffing about. It was her diversity, her wide selection of genres that she covered/remade, and her insistance on remaining that way, versus the wooing reps determination to bottleneck her into a one genre single faceted pop music product. Thier idiocy that they would walk away from such a force based on just that, represents everything that I remember despising about the biz.
For that also, Eva remains one of my guilty pleasures to this day, and I am avenged still when I hear of her local CDs moving up thru charts in other countries that are just now discovering her, now 17 yrs after her death in 1996.
Yesterday, was Eva Cassidy's birthday. And with the greatest gift of all being legacy, I wanted to take a moment to pay tribute to her, and everything that would have been, should have been, and with no help inevitably was and still is, and will no doubt continue to be.
