If you read all the comments on this diary on Eva Cassidy's music, you would have encountered a comment by Leaves on the Current about a project run at the NPR website asking the help of their listeners/readers help them select 50 great voices in recorded history for a year long exploration. If you follow the link, you can pick five you think should be in that final 50, and explain why. Leaves picked Louis Armstrong, Eva Cassidy, Salif Keita, Nina Simone, and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. Some people suggested that when I made my choices, I do so in a diary, offering my reasoning, and inviting others to do the same. This is that diary.
I went through all the names alphabetically, and built a preliminary list
Marian Anderson
Chuck Berry
Solomon Burke
Johnny Cash
Eva Cassidy
Ray Charles
Sam Cooke
Ella Fitzgerald
Aretha Franklin
Beniamino Gigli
Billie Holiday
Etta James
George Jones
K. D. Lang
John McCormack
Joni Mitchell
Milton Nascimento
Willie Nelson
Edith Piaf
Otis Redding
Yossele Rosenblatt
Nina Simone
Bessie Smith
Sarah Vaughan
Hank Wilson
Stevie Wonder
I then considered why I wanted to make my choices. I decided that I wanted to pick people whose work deserved a more thorough exploration, so that more people would know about the singer and the body of work. I also felt it should be singers whose work stood up as superb, and influential on others. I debated whether to limit myself to deceased artists, but decided that there were some alive whose work clearly deserved the attention and a broader audience. I also decided that I wanted my five choices to cover, as the list above indicates, the breadth of my interest in music.
Like my wife, I included Eva Cassidy. Since writing that diary, which will by itself explain why I feel so strongly, I have finally broken down, and now how 10 of her albums, to which I may listen while driving or even in my classroom.
The other choices were harder,
My next pick was YOSSELE ROSENBLATT. Perhaps the most famous cantor ever, his influence on Jewish music was huge. He recorded liturgical music and popular music. He performed in concerts. He reminded Jews - American and otherwise (he died in Israel) of the richness of their own musical tradition.
Let me offer two short clips.
Acheinu:
and Aheim, recorded only a few days before his death in 1933:
SOLOMON BURKE is one of the great figures of Black Music. I chose him because he is somewhat less known than the other choices I considered, Sam Cooke and Otis Redding. Burke, still alive in his late 60s, started life as a preacher, began doing gospel music and moved across in to various secular genres.
His best-known song is Cry to Me:
A live performance from Germany of Down in the Vallue:
And a 2003 performance of Everybody Needs Somebody to Love:
EDITH PIAF is one of the greatest singers ever. No, it is not a great voice when compared to others, although it is distinctive. When I was much younger, the age of the 10th graders I now teach, she still carried a great impact in the US. She is certainly the most popular singer in French history, and her influence went far beyond her.
Here she is singing one of her best known songs in 1961, two years before her death. It certainly expresses what she felt about her own life. Non, je ne regrette rien:
La Vie en Rose is for me a song that is quintissential - not just of Piaf, but I cannot think of any song that mentally invokes France, especially Paris, for me:
There may now be Three Irish Tenors, but originally there was only one. JOHN MCCORMACK was probably the one singer whose records would be found not only in Irish homes, but across a wide variety. I used to have several 78s that my father took from his home in Utica New York - where he lived with a father born in Poland who loved McCormack. I gave them to a friend, an Irish cop I knew in Moorestown New Jersey, where I first taught school. Frank and I used to have coffee together almost every morning. He died tragically when he accidentally walked into a bank robbery. He was shot, and as he was dying, took his gun out of his holster for only the second time when he was not on a range and emptied it at the fleeing robbers. I remember how move Frank was when I gave him a package of John McCormack records.
McCormack could do many kinds of music. Here he is singing Il mio tesoro from Don Giovanni:
I'll Walk Beside You:
It's a Long Way to Tipperary:
and finally, the Irish Patriotic Song, written by Thomas Moore, The Minstrel Boy, which some may remember Sean Connery singing as he is being killed in The Man Who Would Be King:
Those are my choices. I would be delighted if you would share yours as well.
Peace.