The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face

History

The song was written by Ewan MacColl after Peggy Seeger requested him to pen a song for a show she was performing in at the time. He wrote the song quickly and taught it to Seeger over the telephone. Seeger herself provided further background to the story. She had started an affair with MacColl in London in 1956, but returned to the U.S. to separate herself physically from MacColl because he was already married with a child. However, they stayed in contact by phone, and MacColl also sent her tapes to listen to while they were apart. The following year, when Seeger was working for a radio show in Los Angeles, she informed MacColl that the show had asked for a "hopeful love song" because all the folk songs she sang were sad. In one of his phone calls to her from England, MacColl then sang the song he had written to Seeger. While the song was written to be about McColl and her, Seeger said that she did not relate to the song that way because she was not "in love" with him at the time, and she sang the song from his perspective instead. Seeger performed the song in Los Angeles and then in Chicago, but MacColl himself never recorded the song after singing it to her.

While Seeger was the first to perform this song live at folk concerts, she did not release her version until 1962. The earliest recording of the song was made in 1961 by Bonnie Dobson and released on her June 1961 debut album, She's Like a Swallow and Other Folk Songs. Dobson had first heard Seeger perform the song at the Colorado Folk Festival on October 31, 1960, and learned all of the words after hearing other performers sing it at subsequent folk concerts.

MacColl made no secret of the fact that he disliked all of the cover versions of the song. His daughter-in-law wrote: "He hated all of them. He had a special section in his record collection for them, entitled 'The Chamber of Horrors'. He said that the Elvis version was like Romeo at the bottom of the Post Office Tower singing up to Juliet. The other versions, he thought, were travesties: bludgeoning, histrionic, and lacking in grace." Peggy Seeger said that she disliked the way Roberta Flack sang the song when it became a hit but has since "come to like it a lot".

Roberta Flack version

The song was popularized by Roberta Flack in a version that became a breakout hit for the singer in 1971–1972. The single had been a sleeper hit more than three years after its original 1969 release on her album First Take, in part because it was included in Clint Eastwood's 1971 directorial film debut Play Misty for Me. Flack's recording ultimately topped the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles of 1972 more than three years after it was recorded.

Flack knew the song from the Joe & Eddie version, which had appeared on the folk duo's 1963 album Coast to Coast (as "The First Time"). Flack's friend, singer Donal Leace, brought the track to Flack's attention. After teaching "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" to the young girls in the glee club at Banneker High School in Washington, D.C., Flack regularly performed the song in her set-list at Mr. Henry's, a club on Pennsylvania Avenue where Flack was hired as resident singer in 1968. In February 1969, Flack recorded the song for her debut album First Take. That rendition was much slower-paced than Seeger's original, with Flack's take running more than twice the two-and-a-half-minute length of Seeger's. Flack recalled that when she made her studio recording of "The First Time...", she felt the loss of her pet cat, which had been run over by a car.

Flack's slow and sensual version, chosen by Clint Eastwood for his 1971 directorial film debut Play Misty for Me, underscored a love scene featuring Eastwood and actress Donna Mills. Flack later recalled how Eastwood, who had heard her version of "The First Time..." on his car radio while driving down a freeway in Los Angeles, phoned her at her Alexandria, Virginia home. Flack remembered that Eastwood said, "'I'd like to use your song in this movie...about a disc jockey [with] a lot of music in it. I'd use it in the only part of the movie where there's absolute love." She said okay. "We discussed the money," she added. Eastwood agreed to pay $2,000 to use Flack's version of the song, "and he said, 'Anything else?' And I said: 'I want to do it over again. It's too slow.' He said: 'No, it's not.' "

Flack also recalled that during the First Take sessions, her producer Joel Dorn had suggested re-recording "The First Time..." with a slightly faster tempo and lyric edit to trim its running time, but Flack did not agree: "Joel said: 'Okay, you don't care if it's a hit or not?' I said: 'No sir.' Of course he was right for three years, until [after] Clint got it." Flack's version of "The First Time..." exploded in popularity following the November 1971 release of Play Misty for Me. This persuaded Atlantic Records to issue the track as a single — trimmed by a minute in length — in February 1972.The single track became a major hit in the United States, reaching No. 1 for six weeks on both the Billboard Hot 100 and easy listening charts in the spring of 1972, with a No. 4 R&B chart peak. Reaching No. 14 on the UK Singles Chart, Flack's "The First Time..." was No. 1 for three weeks on the singles chart in Canada's RPM magazine.

"The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" was played as wake-up music for the astronauts aboard Apollo 17 on flight day 9 (Friday, December 15, 1972), their final day in lunar orbit before returning to Earth. Apollo 17 ended the last human explorations of the Moon. The use of the song was possibly inspired by the Moon's face observed below the spacecraft.

Charts

Weekly charts

Year-end charts

All-time charts

Certifications

References

References

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