Ted Gioia is the world’s best music critic. So when he writes about the brilliance of Eva Cassidy, who passed to glory 25 years ago, far too soon, you really should listen.

[H]er most unlikely success was achieved with a song that was more than sixty years old, and performed so often that few would expect it had any new secrets to share. But at Blues Alley that night, Cassidy decided to sing “Over the Rainbow” from the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. […]

Like me, Cassidy had heard this song every year as a child, when The Wizard of Oz was broadcast as an annual ritual on network television. She had performed it previously at a high-profile Washington DC music award show and left the audience stunned. […] “When she started to sing, they just… stopped,” Schreibman continues. “[…] Ron Holloway said that he was on the way out the door but when he heard Eva he came back in.”

So at Blues Alley, with the recording equipment that her cashed-out pension had hired capturing this one night of music, she decided to sing it again, accompanying herself on guitar. And this performance, also preserved on film, did more than anything to catapult her to fame.

Read the whole thing, and listen to Eva’s glorious catalogue. How Can I Keep From Singing is one of my favourites.