TONIGHT'S SUBJECT: One singer recently had the number one CD on the British charts, and five CD's in the top 150. On top of that, she was an American. But the real story is that she passed away a few years ago, and never saw her success.
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It's always been a cliché, and the plot of many bad movies, the artist who dies and whose work is suddenly worth millions, and I think the movies usually had the artists faking their deaths, or something like that. Our broadcast tonight is the real-life version of this, but without the cynicism.
The way Nightline works, the correspondents and producers pitch story ideas to us, and Ted and the senior producers and I decide which ones to go ahead and do. One of the Nightline principles is that, even if we don't much like the idea, if the person pitching it really cares, I mean really really cares, we generally say go ahead, because if someone is passionate about a story, chances are the broadcast will be pretty good. That's what happened in this case. I admit it, I wasn't wild about it when Dave Marash first pitched it. But he believed in this story, and so we present it tonight. And by the way, he was right, I was wrong. But I want to let him tell you about it himself, so here's his note about Eva Cassidy:
---- Reporter's Notebook By Dave Marash Correspondent, ABC News Nightline
Like almost everyone, I missed Eva Cassidy, the first time, the real time,the live time.
This was, originally, an embarrassment to someone who considered himself a "maven" of Washington-area music to be told by an old friend (an out-of-towner, no less!) that I had to hear the CD of this "great singer from your town." Once I did hear them, in 1997, I became an immediate and intense fan, and my embarrassment turned to deep regret that I had never heard her sing before she died of cancer the year before, at the age of 33.
I tried to make up for it, by pressing her CDs on dozens of people I knew would love them. Eva Cassidy's "Over the Rainbow" was the first tune played on my traveling stereo in my hotel room at the end of almost every shooting day I spent in the Balkans during the years 1998 and 1999 years spent mostly in, or just outside, the tortured Kosovo. My crewmates and I were witnessing guerilla wars, waves of ethnic cleansing and the destruction and disruption of hundreds of thousands of lives. Yet we would follow the days of painful witness with nights of Eva's heartfelt invocation of that place "where the clouds are far behind me." We all knew it was a strange conjunction, but we all drew comfort from it.
Then, shortly after the first of this year, I learned from some of my English colleagues, who had joined in those hotel room listening sessions,that Eva Cassidy was all the rage on BBC Radio and TV. By March, her CD Songbird, was No. 1 on the BBC "Top of the Pops 2" album chart, and five of her discs were in the British Top 150. People all over the UK were clearly hearing the same ravishing beauties in Eva's music that had won me over.
This wonderful, "fame after death, after life in obscurity" story was too good to ignore, and besides, it gave me a chance to posthumously "meet" the singer I had loved for years.
How I loved learning that the sweet singer could be a tough cookie who carried her own gear and sacrificed her "career" to a conviction, that she could sing only songs she cared about. Eva's second "fault" was that she cared about and insisted on singing songs in just about every musical style she heard from pop to folk to jazz to gospel. America's format-defined music industry could not handle that either.
So for the most part, Eva Cassidy's musical career never happened until her music happened to be heard in another country, in another hemisphere, years after her death.
Now we all know.
As it says in the title of another of Eva's best songs, "What a Wonderful World!"
---- We will be posting a clip of one of the rare tapes of Eva Cassidy performing, along with a couple of songs, on the Nightline page at ABCNews.com. We hope you enjoy tonight's broadcast, and we hope that everyone has a safe, and happy weekend. See you all next week.
Friday, May 25, 2001
Leroy Sievers Executive Producer Nightline Offices Washington, D.C.
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