HER story has entered rock mythology. Eva Cassidy died of cancer in 1996 at the age of 33, her nightingale voice virtually unknown outside her native Washington DC, no major label having granted her a contract.

Yet with the new addition of Imagine, there are now seven albums in the Cassidy canon, still more of her "previously unreleased" live and studio recordings, home demos and club-gig audition tapes being bolted together by Blix Street Records founder Bill Straw, who oversaw the Songbird and Time After Time compilations.

Cassidy was an old-fashioned cabaret singer - you half expect to hear ice clinking in a whisky glass in the smoky gloom - and how she could croon and swoon, and howl and holler too. This latest backward glance is more lonely lunchtime housewife than supper-club romance or hell-of-a-day blues.

Her versions of Fever, Imagine, Tennessee Waltz and It Doesn't Matter Anymore are as middle of the road as a flattened hedgehog, yet the haunting stillness she brings to Sandy Denny's Who Knows Where The Time Goes? and Danny Boy justify the posthumous hype.

So too does her piano-nourished, soulful reading of I Can Only Be Me, a Stevie Wonder song so obscure that even he is yet to record it. Imagine already has entered the British album charts at number one and, amazingly, the Cassidy cash-in looks likely to run for ever and Eva, world without end: a collection of duets with her brother Dan is under preparation.

Updated: 09:53 Thursday, September 12, 2002