Little Eva grows up with guitar

The ballad of folk chansonniere Eva Henychova.

When Eva Henychova was 11 and growing up in a Moravian city called Gottwaldov, she entered a competition and won one of the three title roles in a communist-era television serial called „We Small-Town Girls“ (My holky z mestecka). As „Little Eva“, the adorable redheaded child became a popular favorite for the life of the series, which was just a few months. That was in the mid-1980s. But even lately, when the slight redhead of 27 slips into a seat at a Prague restaurant for a luncheon interview, heads turn and a murmur of „Little Eva“ runs from table to table. Only a handful of customers, however, know what she does now – and none of them could imagine that, on this night, she will sing for a squat (illegally occupied housing) in Prague 7- Holesovice.

„It’s a first for me,“ Eva acknowledges. I gave an interview to Novy prostor [New Space, voice of the homeless], so the squatters called up and invited me.“ Having reached the magazine’s audience, the folková šansoniérka (folk chansonniere), – whose concert venues include theaters, churches, synagogues, assembly halls, arenas and jails and whose audiences have included Czech soldiers serving in Bosnia and Czech minorities in Croatia, Ukraine, Romania and Moldava – could hardly say no.

Will she be paid? „No fee, of course,“ she replies, „but they’re going to try to charge 10 Kc [30 cents] admission, which I get to keep. We have to hope the police don’t show up. But if they do, I suppose we’ll have to let them in free.“ She punctuates this possibility with a girlish giggle.

I have my own world,

I’m not afraid,

Still I’m trembling with fear here today.

Life, you misery, you bitch,

Only you know how much I can yet bear.

(from Sanson)

Torchy, sexy, pious and caring: That’s how Little Eva grew up on the rocky road from Gottwaldov to God. By the time she ran away at 18 in 1992, the Velvet Revolution had reverted her hometown’s name to Zlin, but life hadn’t improved that much in her battling family. (Her parents, whom she now describes as „a fourth generation of atheists,“ eventually divorced.) She fell in love with a man she followed to Prague, where the romance crashed. But here she found another love: Jesus.

Evicted several times, homeless in the uncaring metropolis, the small-city girl who’d burned her roots behind her was befriended by a priest and given lodging in the Ursuline convent next door to the National Theater. At 19, she was baptized Catholic and considered becoming a nun. But then she was accepted as a student by the Jaroslav Jezek Conservatory, which trains nonclassical musicians.

Her main qualification to study classical guitar with Milan Tesar and singing with Jarmila Chaloupkova was that, at 16 – strumming the guitar she’d bought with her winnings from the TV serial – she won top individual honors in a national contemporary folk-music competition called Porta in Plzen (Pilsen).

Sometimes singing the songs of Barbra Streisand and Freddie Mercury, she found as she developed her confidence that only her own words and music expressed her deepest emotions, particularly where God was concerned. Her first CD, Svitani (Daybreak), released during her third of five years at Jezek, contains only her own songs; so does her second, Za stenou z papiru (Behind the Wall of Paper). And that was when she labeled herself folk chansonniere.

Chansonnier is a cabaret term for an artist who writes and performs his own music and lyrics; to Henychova this also means accompanying herself on guitar without orchestral or ensemble backing, unlike the great chanteuses Edith Piaf and Hana Hegerova. As she embarked on her concert career upon graduation from Jezek, she chose to stay out of the mainstream by avoiding even independent record labels, let alone Prague or international agents and managers. Instead, she helps finance her concert bookings (particularly the nonprofit ones) not just from admissions and performance fees, but also by marketing her CDs there – not in retail stores. Thus far, she has sold 8,000 copies.

In this, she was abetted by a friend she made during her destitute days in the capital, Vaclav Jansta, who lost contact with her when she entered the nunnery, but got in touch again when she was completing her studies. A nonbeliever when they first met, he became her godson when he was baptized in 1998 and her husband in 1999. Not much later, Jansta gave up his tourist-accommodation business in Prague to be his wife’s full-time manager.

Their base is a tiny three-room chateau on church property in the spa town of Luhacovice, just south of her native Zlin. But they’d like to move to a more central location, somewhere between Havlickuv Brod and Jihlava, to facilitate her touring.

Ten years her senior, her husband is her fifth godchild. The youngest is a friend’s 3-year-old; the other three are concertgoers who were her groupies before she stood godmother to their baptisms. She also has an „adopted child“ she subsidizes in India. How about children of her own?

„That’s the music of the future,“ she says, flashing her radiant Little Eva smile. And Little Eva she remains, according to her husband: „She’s exactly the kind of woman everybody wants to take care of – the child you want to spoil. And I’m busy spoiling her.“

I cannot live in this country,

Which I love, which I don’t curse.

I cannot stay in this country.

I simply know I’ll go elsewhere.

-from Prevoznik (Ferryman)

An Eva Henychova concert is an intense, intimate communion between her and God. „Your eyes, Your breath, I cannot refuse,“ she sings in a hymn to Him, Krajinou pouste (Desert Landscape). There’s a chair reserved for her up in heaven, she sings in Zidle, but „if I start to be naughty/ Someone will sit in my chair … and I’ll have to stand.“ Here on earth, Strach (Fear) is a man with a faint whiff of sulphur („Tonight he’ll knock on your door/Nothing will help, since you believe in him“). Even if you don’t understand a word of her very poetic Czech, you’ll feel the compassion – and the pain.

„I’m reaching out to people at the breaking point,“ she says, „people at the edge of this weird world, searchers with a desire to find something out. Maybe it’s God. Maybe it’s truth. But I know I’m telling the truth about me.“

All song lyrics (c) Eva Henychova; used with her permission and translated into English by Martina Sedlakova for The Prague Post.

vital statistics

Born Sept. 8, 1974, in Gottwaldov (now Zlin).

Educated Jaroslav Jezek Conservatory, Prague, diploma 1999.

Eva Henychova will give a recital to benefit the Altisa international network’s program to support requalification of female prison inmates at 5 p.m. Tuesday, May 14 in the Nursing Home of St. Charles Borromeo (Domov sv. Karla Boromejskeho), K sancim 50, Prague 6-Repy, where jailed women are serving time in the north wing. Admission: 30 Kc (90 cents). A guided tour of the facility will be given at 4 p.m. For information, tel. 3530 1176; fax 302 3247; e-mail: dcbrepy@omadeg.cz.