The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" is a 1957 folk song written by Ewan MacColl for his wife Peggy Seeger. It was popularized by Roberta Flack and became a breakout hit for the singer after it appeared in the film Play Misty for Me. Though the song first appeared on Flack's 1969 album First Take, it topped the Billboard Hot 100 and won the Grammy Award for Song of the Year three years later.
MacColl wrote the song for Seeger, a folk singer, after she asked him to pen a song for a play she was in. MacColl wrote the song and taught it to Seeger over the phone. The alternative version of the creation of this song is that MacColl, a political singer/songwriter was challenged by a friend to write a love song. This song was the result. The song, as performed by Seeger, featured a faster tempo than the Flack version and clocked in at two and a half minutes long.
Flack's slower, more sensual version was used by Clint Eastwood in his 1971 directorial debut Play Misty for Me during a lovemaking scene. With the new exposure, Atlantic Records cut the song down to four minutes and released it to radio. It became an extremely successful single in the United States, hitting #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the spring of 1972 and remaining there for six weeks; the song also spent six weeks atop the adult contemporary chart. It reached number fourteen on the UK Singles Chart. The success of "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" essentially launched Flack's career as a popular singer, and the single became one of her signature songs.
Cover versions
As a folk song, "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" has been covered by numerous artists such as Leona Lewis, Marianne Faithfull, the Kingston Trio, the Chad Mitchell Trio-Mike Kobluk solo, Gordon Lightfoot, Shirley Bassey, Celine Dion, Bert Jansch, Maria Taylor, Peter, Paul and Mary, We Five, Johnny Cash, the Chi-Lites, José Carreras, Jeffrey Gaines, Isaac Hayes, Nana Mouskouri, Bradley Joseph, Joanna Law, Richard Marx, Alison Moyet, George Michael, Elvis Presley, Stereophonics & Jools Holland, Mel Tormé, Vanessa L. Williams, Cindytalk, Amanda Palmer, Christy Moore, David Cook, Journey South, Kate Cebrano, Lauryn Hill, Regine Velasquez and Marcia Griffiths (member of the I-Threes). There is also a jazz rendition of the song by the Rachel Z trio, on their album of the same name. It has also been used as a sample in the Drum & Bass song Dimensional Entity, released by Teebee and the Future Prophecies. Don't forget eternal performance at Jimmy Castor Bunch.
