Georgia O'Keefe once observed, "Singing has always seemed to me the most perfect means of expression. It is so spontaneous. And after singing, I think the violin. Since I cannot sing, I paint." Unlike O'Keefe, one of her idols, Eva Cassidy never had to make a choice. Her talents as singer, instrumentalist and visual artist are radiantly evident on Eva By Heart, the legacy of a woman who brought beauty to the eyes, ears and hearts of everyone she encountered.

A deeply though unconventionally spiritual person, she viewed her talent as a gift and an obligation. Clearly, she inherited a predisposition for creative expression from her parents. Her father, Hugh, who taught special education at Prince George's County, Maryland, public schools, is a bassist, cellist, and sculptor. Her mother Barbara, the couple met in Germany in 1960, comes from a family of craftsmen and decorators. When Eva, born in 1963, began drawing at 2 and 1/2, her sensitivity to form and color were immediately apparent. At 9, she became serious about music, singing and practicing guitar hour after hour. Hugh taught her the rudiments of guitar technique, introduced her to folk music, Buffy St. Marie, Josh White, Pete Seeger, and formed a family ensemble that combined four-part vocal harmony with his bass, Eva's guitar, and her brother Dan's violin. (A highly accomplished fiddler, Dan, who plays on the opening and closing tracks of this CD, now lives in Iceland and performs throughout Europe.)

In her teens, Eva sang and played with a pop group, Stonehenge, and spent a summer performing six shows daily with Dan as part of a country band at Wild World, a local theme park. On weekends, she bicycled from Old Town Alexandria to the museums on Washington D.C.'s Mall to study the works of Vermeer, Van Gogh and other favorite painters. After high school, she enrolled in art classes at Prince George's Community College but was frustrated by the instruction she received. ("I'm not learning anything," she complained to her mother. "The skills of the old masters are being lost.") Abandoning her studies, she worked as a plant propagator at a nursery, a job that engaged her love of nature. Each October, she and a bicycling friend camped out on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. "Nature was her soul," recalls her friend Ruth Murphy, the mother of a newborn daughter named Cassidy. "She respected and nurtured everything that grows, crawls and flies, even worms and slugs."

Eva was a complex person, painfully shy, vulnerable to criticism and subject to seasonal depressions, yet opinionated and stubborn, unyielding in her personal values and artistic principles. She loved solitude, bicycling, movies and Cheetos, hated high school, dresses, aggressive drivers and the exploitation of women in advertising and television. She was obsessive about her art projects, painting, drawing, sculpting, designing jewelry, and decorating furniture and clock faces. Extremely self-conscious, she had little interest in pursuing a professional career in art or music, preferring to surround herself with supportive friends who served as her advocates. She had few possessions and modest goals; sometimes she spoke of wanting to live in a cottage by the ocean, and no sense of money. She didn't have a checking account until she was 30, and worried that material success would threaten her identity. Battling the melanoma that took her life at 33, she told her mother "All I want to do when I get well is sing and travel around with my music"