Though many have come to similar conclusions since, Biondo was one of the first to do so. “By the time I finished the album, I came to the conclusion that this was one of the best singers ever.”
“As soon as her vocal came on, I felt it was extraordinary,” he said. “We have this wonderful nightingale,’” Griffith told him, Straw recalled. It was another singer on the label, Grace Griffith, a friend of Cassidy’s from the Washington DC club scene, who introduced her music to Blix Street chief Bill Straw. Before making a deal with Eva’s estate, the imprint had achieved modest sales with recordings by jazz instrumental bands and Celtic singers, the best-selling of whom was Mary Black. The small label that set things in motion, Blix Street Records, seemed an unlikely engine to power such a success. But it never would have happened without the stalwart efforts of some dedicated supporters, as well as several connections that brought her songs to the attention of more media gatekeepers than normally receive credit in the tale. The story that emerged later – of a talent barely recognized in her lifetime, who went on to achieve rapturous posthumous acclaim – has become one of the most dramatic bad news/good news tales in pop history.
This week will mark 25 years since Cassidy died of melanoma cancer, just 10 months after recording the live album she and Biondo had driven out to pick up that day. Given that, who could have foreseen that Cassidy’s music would one day generate a sustained catalogue that would sell in the multi-millions, creating chart hits all over the world? “At the time, we just hoped to make enough money to buy a PA system,” Biondo said. Over the course of the next few months, she would receive increasingly grim diagnoses of a cancer that had already begun to make quickening race through her body, robbing her of any chance of making a mark during her time on earth. Worse, by the summer of 96, the 33-year-old was facing something dire. After all, Cassidy had been performing for nearly a decade by then in relative obscurity and, while she had a number of meetings with record company executives in that time, they never went beyond the talking stage.
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