Eva Cassidy didn’t enhance Paul Simon’s track. She eliminated all the things that distracted from what it had all the time been.
That’s the case this recording makes, from the primary bar. Cassidy recorded “American Tune” on September 10, 1994, at Pearl’s, a storefront restaurant in Annapolis, solo together with her guitar. Her good friend Bryan McCulley had introduced video tools alongside that night time and plugged it immediately into her soundboard to seize the audio. That call, made for causes that had nothing to do with posterity, is the one purpose this recording exists in any respect. Cassidy labored from reminiscence: notebooks filled with lyrics she not often consulted, the songs dwelling inside her somewhat than on paper. You’ll be able to hear that possession from the opening line. She isn’t remembering a tune. She’s ending a thought she began some place else.
The tune has an extended life earlier than Simon ever touched it. It started as a German love track, “Mein Gmüth ist mir verwirret” (“My thoughts confuses me”), written by the composer Hans Leo Hassler across the flip of the seventeenth century. It turned a hymn, first “Herzlich thut mich verlangen,” later “O Haupt voll’ Blut und Wunden.” Johann Sebastian Bach borrowed it for the St. Matthew Ardour, the place it recurs 5 occasions throughout the oratorio underneath the title it’s nonetheless recognized by amongst musicologists and hymnal editors: the Ardour Chorale. It survives right now in hymnals throughout denominations as “As a result of All Males Are Brothers.”
Simon didn’t decide this melody accidentally. The Ardour Chorale carries the burden of struggling, mourning, and the opportunity of redemption on prime of that struggling, which is exactly the operate it serves inside Bach’s Ardour, marking Christ’s agony at 5 separate factors within the story. Simon pulled it out of that lineage in 1973 and wrote “American Tune” over it, and what he bought without spending a dime was a musical vocabulary already constructed to carry grief with out collapsing into it. A lesser melody couldn’t carry a line like “you may’t be endlessly blessed.” This one was constructed for precisely that job 4 hundred years earlier.
Simon has mentioned the track comes as shut as he ever bought to writing one thing overtly political. In a 2011 interview with Tom Moon, he defined that “it was written simply after Nixon was elected, Nixon’s landslide re-election in November 1972, with Watergate already unfolding and Vietnam nonetheless grinding on. Simon wasn’t writing a diary entry. He was writing for a rustic that had simply watched its personal disillusionment get outvoted, and he reached for a six-hundred-year-old tune about struggling as a result of nothing written that decade would have finished the job as nicely.
The track opens with a list of small failures, “Many’s the time I’ve been mistaken,” transferring by means of confusion and abandonment towards fatigue somewhat than criticism. Beneath the verses sits plain tiredness, the type that comes from paying consideration somewhat than the type that says itself.
Cassidy doesn’t push the track. She lets it carry her as a substitute.
The critic Geoffrey Himes, reviewing her dwell album Nightbird, wrote that “Cassidy wasn’t a diva; she didn’t overload the songs with vocal gymnastics and stratospheric notes”. He described how she indifferent the songs from their style associations, so that every one turned a type of folk-blues-jazz hybrid, pared all the way down to its emotional core, delivered in a mezzo tone so glowing and disarming that she gave the impression to be confiding in every particular person listener. That holds for “American Tune” as a lot as the rest she recorded. Gone is the track’s Seventies folk-rock manufacturing. What’s left is the structure beneath: the Hassler-Bach melody, the minor-key contemplation, the sluggish climb towards one thing resembling hope.
Her voice does one thing that shouldn’t work however does. It stays gentle, virtually fleeting, a soprano that looks as if it’d vanish for those who listened too onerous, and in some way carries actual weight anyway. Most gentle voices battle with the type of passionate supply that comes extra naturally from decrease registers. Cassidy discovered a approach by means of that limitation with out showing to attempt.
Take heed to the bridge: the dream of dying, the soul rising unexpectedly. She softens virtually to a whisper on “dying,” then builds “rose unexpectedly” as if she’s the one lifting off the bottom. Nothing in regards to the second reads as show. It feels like somebody pondering out loud in music.
If you recognize Cassidy’s story, you recognize the define. Native recognition round Washington, D.C., an unwillingness to commit to 1 style when the business needed her to select a lane, a analysis that arrived too late. She observed hip ache in July 1996, months after Stay at Blues Alley had lastly began drawing consideration. By October she wanted a walker to carry out. She died on November 2, 1996, ten months to the day after her first night time at Blues Alley, a present she’d paid for herself by cashing in a small pension from her job at a plant nursery. She was 33.
What’s notable about “American Tune” particularly is how little it wants that biography to land. The story provides context. It doesn’t provide the sensation.
There’s a smaller, stranger story from that night time at Pearl’s. Cassidy’s good friend Celia Murphy was within the viewers and requested her afterward why she’d skipped the track’s second verse. Cassidy seemed again blankly, unaware she’d left something out. Murphy sang her the lacking strains. Cassidy’s response was a flat, shocked “Oh… yeah.” Neither of the opposite two Pearl’s recordings from that stretch comprises the verse both. Chris Biondo, who produced the classes, has mentioned Cassidy saved lyrics in a pocket book however virtually by no means referred to it, singing all the things from reminiscence as a substitute. The hole doesn’t register as a spot. The track holds collectively with out it, which is its personal small argument for a way little of a track’s which means is determined by completeness and the way a lot is determined by conviction.
That intuition runs by means of Cassidy’s complete catalogue of Simon covers. She additionally recorded “Kathy’s Track” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” and Himes has referred to as her top-of-the-line Paul Simon interpreters on file, noting that even a track as acquainted as “Bridge Over Troubled Water” sounded new in Cassidy’s throat, capturing its gospel scale with out ever tipping into self-aggrandizing efficiency.
Simon’s lyrics transfer by means of loaded American imagery, the Mayflower, the Statue of Liberty adrift at sea, a ship that sailed the moon, with out tipping right into a civics lesson. Then the refrain lands: “We come within the age’s most unsure hour, and we sing an American tune.” That line utilized to 1973. It utilized to 1994, when Cassidy sang it at Pearl’s. It applies now, as a result of each technology hears itself in “American Tune”: each technology ultimately discovers the nation it inherited is completely different from the one it imagined.
“You’ll be able to’t be endlessly blessed” is the road doing the true work. Not cynicism a lot as realism, the type of factor you inform your self after getting by means of one troublesome stretch, understanding one other is coming. It’s additionally the type of factor you say to another person, to allow them to know you perceive what they’re carrying.
Loads of singers have lined “American Tune.” Few take away a lot with out diminishing it. This recording comes from a solo, guitar-only efficiency somewhat than a studio session, and Blix Avenue’s Invoice Straw had three completely different dwell variations to decide on between for the 2003 album. He introduced in singer Grace Griffith to interrupt the tie; she picked the Pearl’s tape with out hesitation. Biondo has referred to as it one of many 5 greatest issues ever dedicated to an Eva Cassidy file, pointing to the truth that she’s each enjoying and singing dwell as a real achievement somewhat than a technical curiosity. Guitarist Keith Grimes has made a associated level about solo efficiency typically: a full band opens up arranging potentialities a lone performer doesn’t have, however one thing occurs when one individual, self-accompanied, places a track throughout utterly, and Cassidy had a uncommon present for precisely that.
Cassidy realized the track from her father, Hugh Cassidy, who sang it together with her within the household band within the early Nineteen Eighties alongside songs like “Desperado.” He’s referred to as it in all probability the perfect track on the album, crediting her phrasing above virtually all the things else: understanding when to carry a notice, when to launch it, when to lean right into a phrase and when to drag again. That’s a ability constructed over years inside a musical family, not one thing taught within the summary.
A tune that traces again to sixteenth-century Germany, reworked by a songwriter from Queens grappling along with his nation’s lack of course, sung by a girl from Washington, D.C. who died with none sense of how many individuals would ultimately hear her, that’s about as American a tune as exists, title included. Cassidy stripped the track all the way down to the four-hundred-year-old chorale beneath the folk-rock association, and by the tip of her model, Paul Simon feels like the primary draft.
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