One of the saddest loses to the music industry in the 1990’s was the death of this young song bird who penned her own lyrics, music, and accompanied herself in her musical accomplishments on the guitar.

Eva Cassidy was born the last of four children on February 2nd 1963 to Hugh and Barbara Cassidy in Bowie, Maryland. From an early age Eva’s parents became aware of her musical abilities and her love of art and music and at nine years old her father began to teach her to play the guitar. With her guitar in hand Eva would practice her performances as a child, in front of friends and family.

Cassidy attended Bowie high school in Maryland, during which time she sang with a local band, Stonehenge, but her shyness was a stumbling block to her performance but she soon managed to overcome this when she began her professional career at the age of eighteen. The beginning of Eva’s career saw her performing in the Washington area with another local band called Easy Street. Her older brother Dan was also a member of the band at that time. Their music covered a variety of styles, which had them performing at weddings, corporate parties, and pubs. During the summer of 1983, Cassidy sang and played guitar five days a week at the theme park Wild World.

Throughout the 1980s, Cassidy worked with a number of other bands, including the soul and Motown oriented band The Honeybees, and the techno-pop band Characters Without Names, later called Method Actor. During this period, Cassidy also worked as a propagator at a plant nursery and as a furniture painter in Annapolis, Maryland.

Eva had a vast experience of all areas of music, jazz, blues, folk, gospel and pop classics but it was this that would eventually cause her to lose a recording contract in 1992 with Liaison Records when she refused to narrow her musical style to suit contract demands.

Eventually Eva recorded her first album, The Other Side, a duet album with funk musician Chuck Brown which was released in 1995. As a duo, they performed in the Columbia Arts Festival and opened for Al Green and The Neville Brothers.

Eva’s recording career was anything but smooth. After securing a deal with Apollo Records the company went bankrupt and Cassidy and Biondo decided that she would release her own live album.

In January 1996, Cassidy recorded the album Live at Blues Alley over a two day period at while at Blues Alley, Washington, D.C.. And later recorded a studio album which was eventually released as Eva by Heart posthumously in 1997.

During a promotional event for the Live at Blues Alley album in July 1996, Eva became aware of a pain in her hips, which she attributed to stiffness from the reaching and stretching she had been doing while painting murals, a job she took up to earn some money.

Three years prior to this Eva had had a mole removed from her back and once again returning to the doctors she discovered that she now had melanoma. At this time she was given just 3 - 5 months to live and although she opted for aggressive cancer treatment her health deteriorated rapidly. Her final performance saw her singing Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World in September 1996, at the Bayou after which she was admitted to Johns Hopkins Hospital.

On November 2^nd 1996, at just 33 years of age Eva Cassidy died.

Following her death Cassidy was posthumously inducted into the Hall of Fame of the Washington Area Music Association.

In 1998, a compilation of tracks from Eva’s three released recordings was cut onto the CD Songbird. The CD was to remain in relative obscurity for two years until being given airplay on BBC Radio Two by presenter Terry Wogan. After this exposure the album sold over 100,000 copies in the following months. The New York Times spoke of her "silken soprano voice with a wide and seemingly effortless range, unerring pitch and a gift for phrasing that at times was heart-stoppingly eloquent.’

By 2001, her album reached number 1 in the UK charts after the BBC television show Top Of The Pops 2 aired a video of Eva performing Over The Rainbow at Blues Alley which was only a black-and-white camcorder-shot video made by a friend of Cassidy.

In 2003, American Tune became Cassidy's third consecutive #1 album in the UK. No other recording artist in popular music history has been able to match this posthumous success, including Elvis Presley or Jimi Hendrix.

Songbird has since achieved significant chart success throughout Europe and quadruple platinum status in the UK.

Throughout both her life and her death, although American herself, Eva remained relatively unknown iin the United States until March 2001 when ABC's Nightline in the United States broadcast a well-received short documentary about Eva Cassidy, and a similar broadcast occurred on ITV's Tonight with Trevor McDonald in Great Britain in May 2001.

Other CDs released posthumously include: Time After Time 2000, Imagine 2002 and "American Tune in 2003.

In 2001 a book entitled Songbird was released in the UK on the life and work of Eva, based on interviews with members of her close family and associates. The hardcover edition has since sold in excess of 100,000 copies. A U.S. edition published by Gotham Books was released in late 2003 and included additional chapters.

In 2005, when Amazon.com released a list of its top 25 best selling musicians(in order of total units sold) in the site's ten year history, Eva Cassidy was ranked 5th, behind The Beatles, U2, Norah Jones and Diana Krall.

In December 2007, Cassidy's What A Wonderful World was spliced together with new vocals by Katie Melua and released as a duet exclusively at Tesco chains. It debuted at #1 on the UK Singles chart on December 16^th of that year. All profits from the single went to the British Red Cross.

In late 2007, AIR Productions acquired the rights to produce a film based on the life of Eva Cassidy which was to be produced by Amy Redford daughter of Robert Redford and Eva’s parents suggested that the role of their daughter should be played by Kirsten Dunst or Emily Watson.

As of 2003, her posthumously released recordings have sold around six million copies, with Songbird, Imagine and Time After Time all reaching #1 on the UK Albums Charts. Her music has also charted top 10 positions in Australia, Germany, Sweden, Norway and Switzerland.

ABB