The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face
Single by Roberta Flack
from the album First Take
Released March 7, 1972
Recorded 1969
Genre
Soul vocal jazz
Length 5:22
4:15 (1972 radio edit)
Label Atlantic 2864
Songwriter(s) Ewan MacColl
Producer(s) Joel Dorn
“The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” is a 1957 folk song written by British political singer/songwriter Ewan MacColl for Peggy Seeger, who later became his wife, to sing. At the time, the couple were lovers, although MacColl was married to someone else. Seeger sang the song when the duo performed in folk clubs around Britain. During the 1960s, it was recorded by various folk singers and became a major international hit for Roberta Flack in 1972, winning the Grammy Awards for Record and Song of the Year. Billboard ranked it as the no. 1 Hot 100 single of the year for 1972.
There are two differing accounts of the origin of the song. MacColl said that he wrote the song for Seeger after she asked him to pen a song for a play she was in. He wrote the song and taught it to Seeger over the telephone. Seeger said that MacColl, with whom she had begun an affair in 1957, used to send her tapes to listen to whilst they were apart and that the song was on one of them.
The song entered the pop mainstream when it was released by the Kingston Trio on their 1962 hit album New Frontier and in subsequent years by other pop folk groups such as Peter, Paul and Mary, The Brothers Four, and the Chad Mitchell Trio, and by Gordon Lightfoot on his 1966 debut album Lightfoot!
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. And the other versions, he thought, were travesties: bludgeoning, histrionic, and lacking in grace.”
The song was popularised by Roberta Flack in 1972 in a version that became a breakout hit for the singer. The song first appeared on Flack’s 1969 album First Take. Her rendition was much slower than the original, as an early solo recording by Seeger ran two and a half minutes long whereas Flack’s is more than twice that length.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia