The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face

April 24, 2015 • 6:50 am

You thought I’d forgotten Gordon Lightfoot, didn’t you? Well, there are a few good songs left from his superb Lightfoot! album, and this is one. If you’re a bit younger than I, you may remember the 1972 version of this song that became a huge hit for Roberta Flack. But I like Lightfoot’s version better.

“The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” is one of three songs on Lightfoot! not written by Gordon. The songwriter was in fact Ewan MacColl (1915-1989, real name James Henry Miller), who, according to Wikipedia, wrote it for Peggy Seeger, Pete Seeger’s half-sister, also a folk singer. There have been many covers, including ones by Celine Dion and the Smothers Brothers. Wikipedia notes others:

The song entered the pop mainstream when it was released by The Kingston Trio on its 1962 hit album New Frontier and in subsequent years by other pop folk groups such as Peter, Paul and Mary, The Brothers Four, The Chad Mitchell Trio, Gordon Lightfoot and others.

Ewan MacColl himself 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.”

Well, maybe this one, from Lightfoot!, is an exception. If it’s too lachrymose, weigh in below:

Here’s the version sung by Peggy Seeger, with Ewan MacColl on guitar. And indeed, it’s much folkier than all the covers I’ve heard—presumably the way MacColl intended it to be sung. Which do you prefer?

 

29 thoughts on “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”

      1. Look, as I’ve said many times before, I have to go with the features WordPress gives me. That doesn’t include an edit function for comments, so it does no good to kvetch about it.

        If readers ever make a howler and want a correction, email me and I can do it. But don’t do that for things like typos.

  3. I much prefer Lightfoot’s version.

    (I think Mr. MacColl liked that rough (60s) English folk ballad style of singing.)

  4. I like all versions favorites songs, but *I* always prefer whoever I heard sing it *first,* in my case Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary.

  6. If you like a song, the first version you hear is rarely bettered. For example, my two sons swear that Placebo’s version of Kate Bush’s song “Running Up That Hill” is far superior to the original whereas, in my view, it is so clearly inferior it’s not funny.

    1. Yeah. And associations with memories of your past often endear a song to you out of all proportion compared to a dispassionate assessment.

      There are some rare instances of covers I like better than originals. Even Originals I heard first. For example, a cover of Hendrix’s Manic Depression by Seal (vocals) and Jeff Beck (guitar). Marilyn Manson’s cover of Tainted Love. Or Lenny Kravitz’s cover of American Woman, though that’s a close one.

  7. Unquestionably Lightfoot’s version is better musically and vocally. I had avoided Peggy Seeger’s stuff like the plague ever since hearing it in the 60s and as soon as I heard her first words on this video I remembered exactly why. The woman had an incredibly annoying thin whiny voice and bad intonation. An example of everything bad about some “folk music”.

    1. I found it so irritating that I couldn’t listen to any more than the first phrase.
      I imagine that first hearing it sung by Roberta Flack must have “spoiled” it for me, but that’s the way I prefer it.

  8. I couldn’t even get through the screechy MacColl/Seeger version. My favorite is the longest version of Roberta Flack’s cover.

  9. Not one of my favorites. But, Roberta Flack’s version is probably the most notable and popular. Indeed, I thought she was the song was written for her. It was just on the closing credits of the latest episode of Mad Men.

    1. Oh dang it, I broke the roolz. Sorry about that. The auto-embed feature is kind of a pain sometimes (…those times being when I forget it exists, mostly).

    2. The Johnny Cash version is nice. It sounds the closest to Roberta Flack’s, and quite different from both Gordon Lightfoot’s and Peggy Seeger’s.

      And Roberta’s interpretation of it still brings tears to my eyes.

  11. Roberta Flack, and some interesting production subtleties.
    Approaching sublime.

  13. Great stuff. I’ve been listening to Gordon Lightfoot quite a bit this week. I still have to pick this album up!

  14. “And the other versions, he thought, were travesties: bludgeoning, histrionic, and lacking in grace.”

    Ha. I guess he held his nose as he took his songwriter earnings to the bank. Maybe he should have campaigned against mechanical royalties.

    I just don’t see that his critique bears scrutiny, at least as regards The Kingston Trio version, at least, which I highly recommend.

    Did he himself ever record it, so as to be subjected to scrutiny?

  15. Roberta Flack’s version had a lot of space, an airiness that was appealing, but here I prefer Lightfoot’s full sound to the folkie version, but that might be the recording production on the latter.

  16. Congratulations on your good taste, though of course, since there’s no free will, perhaps you don’t feel you can take credit for it. I recall seeing & hearing Gordon Lightfoot before he began recording, 1959, at the Village Corner Club (Coffee house) in Toronto. I can calculate the date because Lightfoot was celebrating his 21st birthday on or about that night. Never heard him, or even heard of him, before, but I was impressed by his great voice, energy and musicianship.
    Best wishes.

  17. Without question, Roberta Flack. It was the first version I heard, and gained prominence because it was used in Play Misty For Me.

    I think it is well accepted that people usually prefer the first version of a piece of music they hear. For me the one possible exception to that rule would be Ann and Nancy Wilson’s version (with a few old codgers watching on) of Stairway To Heaven. It’s a great cover, a very close copy of the original.

    Bob Dylan supposedly said Jimi Hendrix did the definitive version of All Along the Watchtower (and I think he’s right). I presume Bob heard his own version before Jimi did it.

  18. Roberta Flack’s cover is simply one of the best pieces of music to come out of the era.

    Not quite in the same vein but along the same lines is Carly Simon’s That’s The Way I Always Heard It Should Be.

    Great stuff!

  19. I much prefer Gordon LIghtfoot’s version to either Peggy Seeger or Johnny Cash

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