Over the Rainbow

Introduction

I first encountered the music of Eva Cassidy a decade ago, a young woman who was gifted with a mesmerizing voice that resonates with the yearnings of the human soul. Recently I rediscovered Eva with my father watching videos of her singing on YouTube. We were particularly moved by her captivating rendition of “Over the Rainbow”, a song that speaks to all people who long to escape from the troubles of this world and who hope for a brighter future. This post includes the live performance of her song, Scripture that gives meaning to the song’s hopeful words, a personal essay by Dave McKenna titled “The Never-Ending Resurrection of Eva Cassidy”, and a 2001 Nightline profile titled “The Musical Story of Eva Cassidy”.

On January 3, 1996 Eva Cassidy performed live at at the Blues Alley jazz supper club in Georgetown, DC. Her set included the iconic song “Over the Rainbow” shown in the video below. Just a few months later In July, Eva was diagnosed with cancer that had spread to her bones and lungs. She died on November 2, 1996, age 33, at her family’s home in Maryland. During her lifetime, Eva was virtually unknown outside of her native Washington DC.

In 1992 Eva had released her first album, a set of jazzy duets with Chuck Brown titled “The Other Side”. In 1996 her second and only solo album was released titled “Live at Blues Alley” which was recorded at the January 3rd concert. After her death, Eva’s music was discovered in England which eventually led to the release of nine posthumous albums, three of which went platinum. Today, with the benefit of the internet and YouTube, Eva’s beautiful soul-stirring voice is touching millions of people all over the world.

This song is particularly poignant as it was written in 1939 by two Jewish immigrants, Yip Harbug (lyrics) and Harold Arlen (music), and was sung by Judy Garland in the iconic film, “Wizard of Oz”. The song was published at a time when the Jews in Europe were coming under increased hostility and the horrors of the Holocaust were imminent. While the Jewish people, and no doubt the whole world, experienced some of the darkest days in history in WWII, it was less than ten years after the song was written that powerful words of the song were fulfilled for the Jewish people. “There’s a land that I’ve heard of once in a lullaby.”

The Jews had long dreamed of a homeland for their people as they had been scattered following the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in first century AD. The 8th century BC prophet Isaiah had asked the question “Can a country be born in a day or a nation be brought forth in a moment” (Isaiah 66:8). The question was answered on May 14, 1948, when Israel was reborn as a sovereign nation after centuries of dispersion and persecution, and that event has set the stage for the fulfillment of many end-time biblical prophecies. This rebirth was a testament to the Jewish people that the “dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.” Although our world is once again in the midst of dark times, this song reminds Jews and gentiles alike that though we face troubling times, we still have hope, and our hope is in almighty God and His promises revealed in Scripture.

A Brighter Future Promised in Scripture

Deuteronomy 30:3-4 . . . Then the Lord your God will restore your fortunes and have compassion on you and gather you again from all the nations where he scattered you. Even if you have been banished to the most distant land under the heavens, from there the Lord your God will gather you and bring you back.

Ezekiel 11:14-17 . . . The word of the Lord came to me: “Son of man, the people of Jerusalem have said of your fellow exiles and all the other Israelites, ‘They are far away from the Lord; this land was given to us as our possession.’ “Therefore say: ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Although I sent them far away among the nations and scattered them among the countries, yet for a little while I have been a sanctuary for them in the countries where they have gone.’ “Therefore say: ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: I will gather you from the nations and bring you back from the countries where you have been scattered, and I will give you back the land of Israel again.’

Ezekiel 36:24-28 . . . For I will take you (the Jews) from among the nations and gather you out of all the countries, and I will bring you back into your own land. I will also sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean. I will cleanse you from all your impurities and all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes and to carefully observe My ordinances. Then you will live in the land that I gave your forefathers; you will be My people, and I will be your God.

Jeremiah 29:11 . . . For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.

John 11:25 . . . Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die.”

John 14:1-3 . . . Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father's house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.

2 Corinthians 4:16-18 . . . Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.

Romans 9:4-5 . . . The people of Israel. Theirs is the adoption to sonship; theirs the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship, and the promises. Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of the Messiah, who is God over all, forever praised! Amen.

Romans 15:4 . . . For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement they provide we might have hope.

2 Peter 3:9 . . . The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.

Revelation 21:1-4 . . . Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

The Never-Ending Resurrection Of Eva Cassidy
By Dave McKenna, February 15, 2023

I met my wife at a pool hall on a Friday night in late 1995. Neither of us had come to Shootz, a billiards bar in Bethesda, Md., to wield a cue. We’d both showed up to hear a local singer who performed there regularly. What became of Eva Cassidy after that night makes for a far more interesting story than our meet-cute.

Cassidy had been singing blues, jazz, and country cover tunes for various D.C. bands for several years by then. But hard work and the voice of an angel often ain’t enough in the music business. Cassidy had only a very small following in her hometown, and was essentially unknown outside the Beltway. One sign of her commercial irrelevance: I paid a $3 cover charge to get into Shootz and hear four full sets of Cassidy and her backing quartet, and I got the $3 back in pool credit.

Cassidy’s career has boomed since the Shootz show. She got huge first in England around the turn of the millennium—she made BBC Radio’s “Songs of the Century” compilation in 2000 and topped the U.K. album charts—and then across Europe and Asia. Her fame eventually reached back to the U.S. To date she has sold about 11 million albums worldwide which far as I can tell makes Cassidy the most successful singer in D.C.’s history who didn’t have to leave town to get famous. Michelle Kwan got the world to listen and much of it to cry when she skated Cassidy’s version of “Fields of Gold” at the 2002 Olympics.

Musicals about Cassidy’s life are in production in theater companies in South Africa and D.C. (the latter based on Cassidy’s friendship with local legend and go-go godfather Chuck Brown). And on March 3, Blix Street Records will release I Can Only Be Me, an album of Cassidy singing with the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO). That’s a band that never had to play a pool hall.

Eva Cassidy didn’t get to enjoy fame or fortune, or to actually sing with a symphony. She never even got a record deal. Mere months after that Shootz show, she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and died in November 1996.

Cassidy had put out just one solo album before her death, the self-released Live at Blues Alley. That project started coming together at the end of 1995, when band members and Eva devotees Lenny Williams and Chris Biondo successfully convinced her that while playing pool halls was fun, for her career's sake she really needed to get a record out.

“We always had trouble getting Eva to finish things, like a [studio] record,” Williams, Cassidy’s piano player and arranger, told me in 2015. “Chris thought doing a live album, getting it out quickly, getting her something she could sell, something for critics to write up, was the answer. And Eva said yes.”

Cassidy asked Blues Alley, a small (capacity: 124) but legendary D.C. club known mostly for jazz residencies, for a two-night run. Blues Alley management told Cassidy she could have Jan. 2 and 3, immediately after the holidays—or, as Williams said, “the two worst nights for clubs in America.” Cassidy took the dates.

I was among those at Cassidy’s Blues Alley gig, and afterward asked her about her career plans. She denied being ambitionless or fearing success; the right offer just hadn’t come yet, she said. She hoped the fresh batch of live recordings of her covering famous pop, rock, gospel, country, and R&B tunes would find some takers.

“I’ll be shopping these tapes around,” she told me.

No major label presented a deal for the Blues Alley sessions that Cassidy deemed acceptable, however. So she and her band put the record out themselves. She needed money from an aunt to pay for 1,000 CDs to be pressed.

“I remember driving with her to Virginia to go pick them up from the CD plant,” Biondo, her bass player and producer, told me in 2015. “She thought we bought too many. So the whole ride she was saying she knows she’ll have boxes and boxes of them lying around forever, really concerned that for the rest of her life she’d be seeing these things in her basement. I was telling her don’t worry about that, that it would be fine. But, I thought it would be a great thing to sell the 1,000 we had.”

By now, several million albums of Cassidy’s Blues Alley recordings have been sold. Cassidy barely lived long enough to get rid of the first 1,000.

At a gathering that summer celebrating the release of Live at Blues Alley she complained to friends about soreness in her hip. Doctors determined the hip was broken not from an injury but from the effects of melanoma, a cancer which they found had also spread to her lungs and throughout her body. She was told she’d likely be dead in a matter of months. Her last public appearance came in September 1996, when she showed up at a tribute concert that local musicians threw for her at the Bayou, a D.C. rock club. Cassidy got to the stage with the help of meds, friends and a walker, and sang “What a Wonderful World.” For the first and last time, local news broadcasts gave Eva Cassidy some coverage.

Eva died on Nov. 3, 1996. She was 33 years old. Soon after, Cassidy’s family agreed to let Blix Street Records, a small label based in Washington state with a stable of mainly Celtic and folk singers, control distribution of her material. Her first posthumous release, 1998’s Songbird, did not make big waves initially.

Cassidy’s big break came around the turn of the century in London, when Paul Walters, the producer of a morning show on BBC radio, heard and fell for Cassidy’s version of “Over the Rainbow.” He convinced presenter Terry Wogan to throw it on the air despite the artist’s anonymity. The reaction from listeners was so swift and positive that the BBC also added Cassidy’s Blues Alley recording of Sting’s “Fields of Gold” to its playlist.

“The phones started ringing, people were writing in saying,”Who was that?’” Walters said. Then in December 2000, BBC television aired a grainy video of Cassidy singing “Over the Rainbow” at Blues Alley on its weekly music show, Top of the Pops. Soon enough, producers were calling it the most requested tune in the decades-long history of the idol-making TV show, and Songbird topped the UK album charts. Two additional repackagings of Cassidy covers, 2002’s Imagine and 2003’s American Tune, also hit No. 1. (A sign that Cassidy remains a force across the pond: Huffington Post UK reported that only Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” and “Time to Say Goodbye” by Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman are played at more British funerals than her “Over the Rainbow.”)

Cassidy’s British takeover, in turn, made her newsworthy back home. People magazine and the New York Times ran features on the dead American singer’s resurrection overseas. Nightline devoted an entire episode to her life and death story, one highlight of which was Bruce Lundvall, the president of the preeminent jazz label Blue Note Records, telling the network that he called Cassidy on her deathbed to personally apologize for not signing her.

"I asked her to forgive me," Lundvall told ABC News. Lundvall has said he signed Norah Jones, maybe the most Cassidy-like pop singer ever, as an attempt to make up for letting Eva down.

Blix Street Records has since released at least 11 more Cassidy collections, on which she covers Buddy Holly to Billie Holiday and about everybody in between. Cassidy’s Blues Alley tracks have been rehashed every which way on these compilations, and the label has even released some of her rehearsal tapes commercially.

According to Blix Street, I Can Only Be Me was made possible by state-of-the-art audio restoration technology developed by filmmaker Peter Jackson while making his epic Beatles documentary, Get Back. Jackson’s brainchild let producers pluck Cassidy’s vocal tracks from the full band mix of studio and even live recordings (including some from the 1996 Blues Alley tapes) and clean them up so her sweet soprano can be thrown on top of orchestra arrangements, which were recorded as recently as January 2021.

If you can block out the grave-robbing aura that has long pervaded any Cassidy project, I Can Only Be Me's orchestral maneuvers work fabulously. Then again, Cassidy’s voice would work in any setting, from a strip center pool hall to the toniest concert hall. As Biondo told the New York Times in 2002, ''As long as she was singing good, the rest of it doesn't matter. And she always sang good.''