Ian Malin
Clint Eastwood was driving down the LA Freeway listening to his car radio in 1971 when Roberta Flack’s version of The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face made him want to pull over for a closer listen. Eastwood was looking for songs for his directorial debut, the creepy Play Misty for Me, and he reckoned Flack’s slow, sensual version of the Ewan MacColl song could underscore a love scene between him and the actress Donna Mills.
Eastwood phoned the singer at her Virginia home and offered to pay her $2,000 for permission to use the song. Flack was happy enough but protested that her version was too slow and that she would like to re-record it. Eastwood disagreed and wanted the rendition which is twice the length of Peggy Seeger’s original. It was a good bit of business by Flack because The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face was to be a massive sleeper hit for her. It was originally a 1969 release on her album First Take but passed the record-buying public by.
Flack, who has died at the age of 88, knew the song from a version by a folk duo Joe & Eddie. The track was on their 1963 album Coast To Coast and it was bought to Flack’s attention by a friend, Donal Leace. Flack performed it in her set-list at Washington DC’s Pennsylvania Avenue club Mr Henry’s where she was hired as resident singer in 1968. Flack had been a junior high school teacher when she approached the jazz club’s then owner, Henry Yaffe, about her desire to follow her musical dream, and her career took off from there.
The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face was written by MacColl in 1957 for Peggy Seeger who was later to become his third wife. MacColl himself never recorded it. Seeger, who is still going strong at 89, performed the song in folk clubs around Britain. It sounds radically different from Flack’s majestic later interpretation which Peggy would always admit dwarfs her effort in every sense, and once Eastwood’s film had revived the fortunes of Flack’s song it would become the top-selling single in the US in 1972. With the lovely Killing Me Softly With His Song, Flack was now a star.
Flack was largely unknown this side of the Atlantic when The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face began to clamber up the British charts in the spring of 1972. But she had at least one British fan. Elton John, who had just hit the charts with Rocket Man, heard Flack’s version of Paul Simon’s Bridge Over Troubled Water from her album Quiet Fire and was so entranced that he sent her a fan letter. ‘Dear Roberta,’ he wrote. ‘I have never heard anything this beautiful in years...’
The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face and Bridge Over Troubled Water have a lot in common. The songs both slowly unspool and showcase the powerful and emotional qualities of Flack’s voice, the choir giving Bridge the texture of a hymn.
In her obituaries Flack has been described as a ‘soul singer’ but she was more than that. Like Elton John, she was a classically-trained pianist and her vocals demonstrated perfect pitch and clarity that make her versions of these two songs in particular so stunning. Flack had spent much of her young years listening to the soprano Leontyne Price. The Mississippi-born Price, a cousin of Dionne Warwick and Whitney Houston, was the first African-American soprano to receive international acclaim.
Flack was forever being compared with Aretha Franklin, a comparison that annoyed her. Franklin’s style had been developed by her upbringing in the Baptist church. Flack had been raised in a more restrained Methodist environment. Either way there have been plenty of fitting tributes in recent days to one of the great American singers of the second half of the 20th century.
The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face is a monumental reminder of her talent, a quiet but powerful love song that can still make the listener feel weak at the knees, the perfect antidote to our dark, troubling times. A host of artists, from Celine Dion and Shirley Bassey to Elvis Presley and George Michael, have recorded TFTEISYF but Flack’s reimagining is the gold standard.
The first time, ever I saw your face
I thought the sun rose in your eyes
And the moon and the stars
Were the gifts you gave
To the dark, and the endless skies
My Love
The song was a stellar hit in more ways than one. On the last day of the lunar orbit of the Apollo 17 mission on December 5 1972 the song was played as wake-up music to the astronauts on board before returning to earth, the song’s lyric now referring to the face of the moon. Imagine you were one of those astronauts, Gene Cernan, Harrison Schmitt or Ronald Evans, hearing Roberta Flack in full flight. It would be difficult coming down to earth after that.
Beautiful tribute Ian. Many thanks.