A Song Story | StoryWindow

I receive Peggy Seeger’s newsletter and enjoyed this story so much, I asked if she would let me share it with my readers as well.
She said yes, please! Enjoy!

From Peggy: I’ve just released my new recording of ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’, the song that Ewan MacColl wrote for me in 1957. Make yourself comfortable and I’ll tell you the story of how it came to be.

Monday 27th March was the anniversary of meeting Ewan MacColl. 1956, in a dingy basement in London’s Chelsea district. We were introduced by the iconic song collector, Alan Lomax. Yesterday, 28th March, was the anniversary of our first kiss, in Ewan’s parked clapped-out Vauxhall with no brakes. Just change gears down. But ah, that kiss ..my toes curled. A major hitch: backpacking me at 21 sought by a 41-year old married man with a 5-year-old son? Serious but not in my playbook.

I returned to the USA and we spoke on the phone, very occasionally. In 1957, during one of those calls, I told him I was on a Los Angeles radio show and the producers needed a happy love song. My man said, “How about this?” and sang ‘The First Time Ever’ right there and then. Yep, that’ll do fine. He never sang it again. It was mine to sing … to him. I loved it. It sang itself every night in the Gate of Horn nightclub (Chicago) for three spring months. I returned to the UK where, after another year of indecision, Ewan and I Velcro’d permanently. Thereafter it featured on every one of our concerts, 33 years and 3 children later. Definitely a happy love song.

I first recorded the song in 1962, on our album ‘The New Briton Gazette, Vol 2’. Other singers began to cover it, including Roberta Flack, who included it on her 1969 debut album. That was the version that Clint Eastwood heard on the radio and put it in his 1972 film, ‘Play Misty For Me’. The song won two Grammys that year, for Record of the Year and Song of the Year.

I’m told by Wikipedia that the song was played as the wake-up music to the Apollo 17 astronauts on their last day in lunar orbit.

I rarely sang it after Ewan died in 1989 but this year I began singing it to myself with piano and an octogenarian lower voice. We’ve recorded it and made a video of it. My daughter Kitty was the director and editor of the film and what an outstanding job she has done.

So: the song can be downloaded on my Bandcamp page (£1) and you can listen and watch the moving piano keys on the video here:

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