The best singer you've never heard
Maybe that's not quite right. She's also probably the best of those you have heard as well. I read a story over at the Weekly Standard recently about Eva Cassidy so I did the mp3 thing. Wow freaking wow!!! I'm going to need to buy the entire catalogue. Her version of "Stormy Monday" just blows me away. What an amazing talent and she's already gone. 
<a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/000/787pdteh.asp"; target="_blank">Earth Angel</a>
Five years after her death, the music of Eva Cassidy is spreading.
by Matt Labash
01/21/2002 12:01:00 AM
Matt Labash, senior writer
[quote]AT THE END of a long driveway that snakes under a canopy of trees, an angel sits in the Bowie, Maryland, backyard of Hugh and Barbara Cassidy. She is guarded by Easter-Island masks built by metal sculptor Hugh, while former nursery-worker Barbara has fashioned a shade-covered ivy grotto. From a distance, the angel looks like the ultimate in lawn-ornament baroque. But with chiseled facial features, copper hair strands, and saw-blade wings, the painstaking creation represents something else entirely.
"That's the angel I made for Eva," says Hugh, of the 33-year-old daughter he and Barbara lost to bone cancer. "I told her when she was sick I was making it for her. She never saw it." Hugh can be forgiven for mistaking his daughter for a celestial being. It's a conclusion people often reach after hearing Eva Cassidy sing.
Cassidy covered every genre from country to folk to gospel shouts. She was capable of performing the scale-flailing pyrotechnics practiced by most of today's overproduced divas. But to cast Cassidy's otherworldly talents into words is to risk doing them a disservice. For as an arranger, a guitarist, and a singer with a voice touched by God, Cassidy quietly distilled the essence of songs like "Over the Rainbow," damaged from years of pulmonary abuse by "Star Search" hopefuls, allowing them to breathe again. The sweet melancholy of any ballad she covered - from Johnny Mercer's "Autumn Leaves" to Sting's "Fields of Gold" - is capable of leaving listeners with a physical ache. For Cassidy didn't merely interpret songs, she inhabited them...<hr></blockquote>
<a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/000/787pdteh.asp"; target="_blank">Earth Angel</a>
Five years after her death, the music of Eva Cassidy is spreading.
by Matt Labash
01/21/2002 12:01:00 AM
Matt Labash, senior writer
[quote]AT THE END of a long driveway that snakes under a canopy of trees, an angel sits in the Bowie, Maryland, backyard of Hugh and Barbara Cassidy. She is guarded by Easter-Island masks built by metal sculptor Hugh, while former nursery-worker Barbara has fashioned a shade-covered ivy grotto. From a distance, the angel looks like the ultimate in lawn-ornament baroque. But with chiseled facial features, copper hair strands, and saw-blade wings, the painstaking creation represents something else entirely.
"That's the angel I made for Eva," says Hugh, of the 33-year-old daughter he and Barbara lost to bone cancer. "I told her when she was sick I was making it for her. She never saw it." Hugh can be forgiven for mistaking his daughter for a celestial being. It's a conclusion people often reach after hearing Eva Cassidy sing.
Cassidy covered every genre from country to folk to gospel shouts. She was capable of performing the scale-flailing pyrotechnics practiced by most of today's overproduced divas. But to cast Cassidy's otherworldly talents into words is to risk doing them a disservice. For as an arranger, a guitarist, and a singer with a voice touched by God, Cassidy quietly distilled the essence of songs like "Over the Rainbow," damaged from years of pulmonary abuse by "Star Search" hopefuls, allowing them to breathe again. The sweet melancholy of any ballad she covered - from Johnny Mercer's "Autumn Leaves" to Sting's "Fields of Gold" - is capable of leaving listeners with a physical ache. For Cassidy didn't merely interpret songs, she inhabited them...<hr></blockquote>
Comments