Musician’s Songs Find an Audience, Years After Her Death

Every day, Bill Straw hears the voice of a dead woman he never met.

He thinks about how he heard Eva Cassidy’s sweet singing voice only weeks before she died of melanoma at age 33 in November 1996, and how he knew the strength, pureness and passion of her songs would move people.

“Getting her music out has become my mission,” Straw said.

Without a big marketing budget or significant radio airplay--Straw, the 61-year-old owner of the independent record label, Blix Street Records in North Hollywood--released in 1998 an anthology of Cassidy’s music, called “Songbird.” Three other Cassidy recordings soon followed.

Cassidy’s music--a combination of jazz, folk, gospel and pop, including remakes of Sting’s “Fields of Gold,” Christine McVie’s “Songbird” and Judy Garland’s “Over the Rainbow”--sparked an international sensation.

In the United Kingdom, Cassidy’s four Blix Street Records albums have sold 1.2 million copies, according to the label. In Australia and Canada, respectively, 30,000 and 10,000 albums have sold.

Hundreds of thousands of people have bought Cassidy compilations in the United States. According to figures from SoundScan, a New York company that monitors retail sales nationwide, about 210,000 of Cassidy’s albums on the Blix Street Records label have sold. But Straw estimates the actual number at 350,000, noting that SoundScan misses the mom-and-pop shops, where Cassidy’s albums do well.

Since the beginning of the year, “Songbird” has often been at No. 1 on Internet retailer Amazon.com’s best-selling music charts, beating out new releases by Bruce Springsteen and Ani DiFranco. The album took the No. 2 spot for the week ending April 22.

In all, three of Cassidy’s recordings last week made it on Amazon.com’s top 30 best-selling music charts for most of this year.

“It’s a pretty phenomenal achievement for an independent album,” said Keith Moerer, music editor-in-chief for Amazon.com. “She’s a great interpretive singer, and there’s a purity in her voice that is very rare. Her music meant something to her. I think the Eva Cassidy phenomenon will continue.”

The Cassidy craze is a bit overwhelming for Straw, a former record executive for Warner Bros., Capitol and MCA (now Universal) who owns and runs the label out of his neighbor’s Parisian-style guest house on Blix Street, near Colfax Avenue and Riverside Drive.

“We’re a small label, so keeping her products in the stores can be challenging,” said Straw, who founded the Blix Street label in 1994, and was previously best known for releasing Celtic artist Mary Black. “I thought [Cassidy] was going to be big, but I didn’t know how big.”

Straw first heard of Cassidy, a native of the Washington, D.C. suburbs, in October 1996, when another Blix Street artist, Grace Griffith, sent Straw a copy of Cassidy’s first album, “Live at Blues Alley.” Cassidy had been selling the album around town from the trunk of her car.

He listened to her soulful rendition of Sting’s “Fields of Gold,” and knew immediately that he had a gem. “I thought, ‘There’s nobody out there like this,’ ” said Straw, who describes Cassidy’s voice as a combination of Ella Fitzgerald, Bonnie Raitt, Aretha Franklin and Roberta Flack. “She has this eclectic, totally synthesized style. She refused to be pigeonholed into one style.”

His joy at discovering Cassidy faded when he learned that she was dying. “I was traumatized,” Straw said. “Here she was being discovered, yet we were losing her at the same time.”

Cassidy died on Nov. 2, 1996. For weeks, he drove around Los Angeles, listening to her music. “I’d get goose bumps,” he said. “I could just feel the hair on my arms standing up. At the time, I wasn’t thinking business.”

From conversations with her family and friends, Straw began to learn about Cassidy, a wholesome woman who wore her light hair in a braid, hiked on weekends and worked in a nursery. She was so painfully shy, she balked at performing at a friend’s wedding. But she was also a person who valued friendship over her fears, and she sang beautifully at the wedding, bringing many to tears.

Cassidy’s admirers also told Straw how she refused to compromise her talents. She turned down deals to sing and market herself in one genre, they said. She sang to please no one but herself.

Her career started to take off three weeks after her death, when the Washington Area Music Awards honored her with artist of the year, album of the year and eight other tributes from the Washington Area Music Awards.

“I began thinking that it was important for the world to hear her music,” Straw said. “It was life-affirming.”

About five months after her death, he flew to Bowie, Md., to meet her parents, Hugh and Barbara Cassidy. They discussed releasing her music. Although traumatized, her parents wanted their daughter’s songs heard.

“Her life, although short, was not in vain,” said Hugh Cassidy. “We feel quite a lift from Eva’s music, and we’ve heard from people who got a boost from one of her songs. Eva helps others get through their problems.”

They signed a contract a day short of a year after her death. Straw and Lois Gerard, his partner at Blix Street, used Web sites and chat rooms to create a Cassidy buzz. They released her recordings in April 1998 in the U.S., where the music garnered press but didn’t take off because Cassidy did not fit into any one radio format.

Straw and Gerard also released her recordings in the U.K., where it went mainstream and, in February, “Songbird” went platinum.

In the U.S., “all it would take is for MTV or VH1 to play her music, and it could take off,” Straw said. “It will probably happen, too.”

Straw also said more releases are planned, although details are still unclear. “We’re getting ready for the explosion,” he said.

Sales spiked in December after National Public Radio aired a segment on Cassidy. Her recordings held four of the top five album sales slots at Amazon.com, including No. 1, with “Songbird.”

“It’s gotten to the point where even Rick Dees might play Eva Cassidy,” Straw said of the veteran pop DJ on KIIS FM (102.7).

“Her success is bittersweet because she is not here to enjoy it,” Straw said. “She is so talented. I think about her every day.”