Roberta Flack – The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face
1972
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Best comments
1.“One of the greatest pairings of song to voice ever. Probably on God's playlist.”
More comments
- 2.“Thank you, Ewan MacColl, for writing this song – which you had to sing over a transatlantic phone call to your beloved, because she was in the US, a country McCarthyite bigotry barred you from entering.”
- 3.“This is my number one song for my wife. Excuse me while I go dance with her, as we have since 1978.”
The story
Ewan MacColl wrote this one in 1957 for Peggy Seeger, the American folk singer who later became his wife. She needed a hopeful love song for a radio show, and he sang it to her down a phone line. MacColl hated cover versions so much he kept them in a corner of his record collection he called the Chamber of Horrors.
Roberta Flack was teaching music in Washington, D.C. when she found it. She cut it in February 1969 for her debut album, First Take, at more than twice the length of Seeger's original and slow as honey. Her producer Joel Dorn wanted it faster. She said no. For almost three years, nothing.
Then Clint Eastwood paid $2,000 to put it under a love scene in his directing debut, Play Misty for Me. Atlantic trimmed a minute off and released it as a single in early 1972, and it sat at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for six weeks, the top single of the year. It won Record and Song of the Year at the Grammys and woke the Apollo 17 crew in lunar orbit that December. This clip comes from 1972, the year a slow song finally got its turn.
