The Song of the Day is:
Roberta Flack – “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”
From the album First Take (1969)
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
Ewan MacColl
Last Sunday we slowed things down a great deal with Sigur Rós because I needed to calm myself. This Sunday we are slowing things down again with Roberta Flack’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”. We’re getting like remarkably slow. This was not an original song by Flack, rather it was written by Ewan MacColl and performed by his future wife, folksinger Peggy Seeger. It became a folk standard with performances by Peter, Paul & Mary and Gordon Lightfoot, and while it was never a fast-paced song, it was nothing like Flack’s version. Flack slowed the song down to sixty beats per minute, or one beat every second, which is quite leisurely. I probably bored the children to tears, but they’ll appreciate it eventually. She has remarked that her thoughts were on her recently-departed pet cat, adding to the melancholy of this interpretation. Her version of the song was part of her debut album, First Take, one of the most confident and stunning debut albums ever. Flack had honed her skills performing and teaching music all over the Washington DC area, and wasn’t exactly young (age 32) by her first release. First Take did not really light the world on fire upon release in 1969, it would take a movie star with a famously attuned ear to break her out. It was Clint Eastwood who sought a sincere love song for his directorial debut, 1971’s Play Misty For Me, a story of a radio DJ with an obsessive fan. After the film, Flack’s fame rose considerably and she found herself as the recipient of the Grammy Awards for Record of the Year and Song of the Year. Remarkably, she won these Grammys four years after the song was initially released (and Ewan MacColl won the songwriter’s award seventeen years after he wrote the song), surely the Grammys have tightened up their rules since then. Flack would repeat the same feat a year later when “Killing Me Softly With His Song” won the same two Grammys, making her the only artist awarded these two trophies in consecutive years. By the time of her Grammy successes, Flack was five albums into her career and had forged a legendary partnership with Donny Hathaway that would last the rest of his life (d. 1979). After Hathaway’s passing she’d frequently duet with Peabo Bryson, and while she remained a vital performer, she had settled into middle age lacking the bite of her early albums. Those first couple albums are classics of an undefined genre that consisted of soul, jazz, folk and adult contemporary. Despite all her massive success in the early seventies, she has never been considered for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (I’ve argued this case previously in one of my “Snub Week” entries). Even though it was already a standard, “The First Time” would later be performed by Elvis Presley, Celine Dion and the Flaming Lips (w/ Erykah Badu), among others. Musicians on this record include Miles Davis’s longtime bassist Ron Carter and famed jazz guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli, who just died of Covid19 this past April.
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Hear Today, Grown Tomorrow 