THE First Time Ever I Saw Your Face is a song for the ages.
Covered a thousand times in a thousand ways, it captures the overwhelming sensation of love at first sight.
Popularised by Roberta Flack’s sensual, soulful take, it also held Elvis Presley, Diana Ross, Johnny Cash and George Michael under its spell.
Three poetic, impossibly romantic verses were written by one folk singer, Ewan MacColl, for another, Peggy Seeger.
“The first time ever I saw your face/I thought the sun rose in your eyes,” it begins.
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MacColl experienced that intense thrill on Tuesday, March 27, 1956, at a smoky basement flat in Chelsea — and he turned it into a song.
He was 41 at the time, a folk firebrand and socialist activist known for Dirty Old Town, about his birthplace of Salford.
He was among a small gathering looking on as Seeger, less than half his age at 20 and newly arrived in the UK, sang traditional ballad The House Carpenter, banjo in hand.
The daughter of a musicologist father and composer mother, she was part of an American music dynasty which included her half-brother, folk icon Pete Seeger, and the brother she often sang and recorded with, Mike Seeger.
All these years later, Peggy is speaking to me via video call from her home in Oxford — city of dreaming spires on the Thames, not the one in Mississippi.
‘In his midlife crisis’
Having played at the first Cambridge Folk Festival in 1965, she’s taking this year’s US legend slot with her musician sons Calum and Neill MacColl and daughter-in-law Kate St. John
Just shy of her 89th birthday, she’s forthright, funny and never far from throwing her head back with a glorious smile. The sun really does still rise in her eyes.
Over the decades, Peggy has been a tireless campaigner for women’s rights, typified by her anthem I’m Gonna Be An Engineer, and a staunch environmentalist but that doesn’t stop her embracing one of the greatest love songs of all time.
Only last year, she released a wistful new recording of First Time Ever.
“My voice has slipped down lower,” she reports. “And I’ve found that the song has an entirely new feeling to it.”
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Recalling that fateful day in 1956, she adds: “I think Ewan probably fell in love with the whole deal.
“He was past 40. He was in his midlife crisis. He had a five-year-old son and a tired marriage in which both parties had already been unfaithful.
“Then along came this just-out-of-teenage American girl with long brown hair and a big banjo with songs that he loved.”
We know MacColl was smitten but how did the object of his desires feel about him?
“The first time I saw Ewan, I thought he was the funniest thing I’d ever seen,” admits Peggy.
“Red beard, black hair, big ears, smoking.
“And he was very, very amorous . . . shall we put it like that!”
The rest, as they say, is history, with the two folk singers from different sides of the Atlantic becoming an item, having children, eventually marrying in 1977 and staying together until his death in 1989.
It’s important to note that after MacColl began his affair with Peggy, his second wife, Jean Newlove, gave birth to their daughter, Fairytale Of New York singer Kirsty, in 1959.
Peggy says Ewan was the first love of her life and “my work soulmate”.
The second is her current partner, traditional singer Irene Pyper-Scott.
“I had known Irene for a long time but the first time I REALLY saw her was like a lightning bolt,” says Peggy.
She tells me that though Irene has moved to the opposite end of the earth — to New Zealand — they talk every day via WhatsApp in the small window when both are awake.
This brings us to First Time Ever’s second verse, which starts: “And the first time ever I kissed your mouth/I felt the earth move in my hand.”
“When I sing it, I always remember the first kiss with either Irene or Ewan,” says Peggy.
“With Ewan, it was fantastic. He really knew how to do it — I’d been dealing with boys up to then.”
The third verse demonstrates the rapid progression of Ewan’s relationship with Peggy, from crush to lover.
It goes: “And the first time ever I lay with you/I felt your heart so close to mine/And I knew our joy would fill the earth/And last ’til the end of time my love.”
'CHAMBER OF HORRORS'
Peggy says: “When it comes to ‘lay with you’, I have to think of the second time with Ewan because the first time was a disaster. The first time with Irene was incredible, so there you go.”
Another aspect of the First Time Ever story is MacColl’s less than favourable opinion of the numerous cover versions, what he called “the chamber of horrors”.
In the Sixties, other folk artists such as The Kingston Trio, Peter Paul & Mary, Bert Jansch and Gordon Lightfoot felt compelled to record the song but it was soul singer Roberta Flack who gave it global recognition.
It was a sleeper hit, appearing on her debut album First Take in 1969 and only reaching No1 in the US three years later after featuring in Clint Eastwood’s haunting thriller Play Misty For Me.
Peggy picks up the story, “Ewan and I opened the post one morning and there was a cheque for something like $75,000.
“At the time, we had been groping for work and for money to keep two families.
“Though we hadn’t heard of Roberta Flack’s version, it turned out that it had whizzed up to the top in America.”
Peggy well remembers their reaction to hearing the song in its chart sensation mode.
“We were both horrified because, as Ewan put it, he wrote it as an hors d’oeuvre and Roberta had turned it into the main meal,” she says.
“My way of singing it takes two minutes and hers takes about five. She milks it but I’ve gotten to like it.”
So what does Peggy think of the Elvis cover?
“Well for one thing, he never got to sleep with her in his song — he danced with her,” she replies with one of those smiles.
“Ewan used to say it was like Romeo down on the ground calling up to Juliet at the top of the Post Office Tower.
“I have trouble with other people’s versions because I can’t hear them telling their own experiences. I feel that they’re just thinking about singing the song.”
Long after Ewan died, Peggy heard Johnny Cash sing First Time Ever on the fourth instalment of his American Recordings, The Man Comes Around, the last album of his lifetime.
‘Extreme version’
“When I first heard it, I hated it,” she says. “It was the singing of a broken old man.”
To Peggy, this wasn’t what she expected from the singer who had walked the line to resist alcoholism and violence, who had swept June Carter off her feet and had proposed to her on stage.
But, as with Roberta Flack, she changed her mind. “Since thinking about singing things lower, I absolutely love the way Cash sings it,” she confesses.
Of all the various attempts at First Time Ever, Peggy believes that one of hers is the most “off-the-wall”.
She’s talking about a pumping electronic dance rendition on a 2012 album called Folksploitation complete with her vocals.
She says: “I recorded it as low as I could singing Roberta’s tune, not the one Ewan wrote, and a friend of my daughter’s turned it into this dance track.
“So I was responsible for one of the most extreme versions of that poor little song. You must hear it!”
Our thoughts turn to another stunning MacColl song, The Joy Of Living, written by a man approaching the end of his life and set in the mountains of Scotland, Wales and England where he loved to ramble.
Peggy provides this moving insight: “The tune is not Ewan’s — it is Sicilian — but it is his swan song.
“They say that men face death with more fear than women and he was very, very afraid of dying.
“I’ve tried to figure out if I’m afraid of dying,” she continues.
“I will be afraid if I’m in great pain and it is drawn out and undignified . . . just give me an easy way out with a chance to say goodbye to my kids and my partner.”
Peggy believes that “women are more attached to life than men.
Men risk their precious bodies so easily — they jump off the sides of mountains, they stand at the bottom of avalanches, they take risks.
“They go to war and face other soldiers, and do these soldiers think they’re going to come back? All of them? Why do they do it?”
Her words bring to mind her recent anti-war song How I Long For Peace and a classic written by Pete Seeger in 1955, Where Have All The Flowers Gone? With wars in Ukraine, Gaza and other places around the world still raging, protest songs new and old stay relevant.
She says of Pete, who died aged 94 in 2014: “Well, we loved each other dearly but it was impossible for us to perform on stage together. We had completely different ways of dealing with things.
“Pete would just throw him-self out there, embrace everybody and make wonderful, wonderful songs without naming any names.”
Peggy says the closest he came to pointing the finger was on Waist Deep In The Big Muddy which appeared during the Vietnam War.
“That suggests a president [Lyndon B Johnson] has taken us into the big muddy and has a wish that he had drowned.”
Peggy laughs when she adds: “I named names though. I did a song about Prince Charles’s wage rise way back. And I can’t remember a word of it!”
Another of her name and shame efforts is called Donald’s In The White House.
As you may have guessed, she’s not a Trump fan. “The country will go into civil war if he gets back in. It’s headed that way,” she affirms.
“Enough numbskulls!”
BIG SETBACK
After all Peggy’s wonderful recollections, we arrive at the present day and her upcoming Cambridge Folk Festival show, for which she has suffered a big setback.
“On February 4th, I had a bad back injury,” she says. “I’ve been practically out of orbit since then.
“Now, I can walk with one stick but, for three months, I wasn’t able to lift the banjo. Physically, I was catapulted into a later time of life.
“I’m doing physiotherapy and I’ve just started to pick up the banjo. I don’t even know if I’ll be able to play it again.
“But I’ve been singing every day — thank God for my voice!”
Whether it’s with or without her banjo, Peggy has a huge back catalogue of songs to draw on, including those from her acclaimed recent albums, Everything Changes (2014) and First Farewell (2021).
A song from the latter, The Invisible Woman, written with son Neill, has received much attention. It’s about how people don’t look at older women.
“And into my teens I was never not seen,” she sings.
Then she muses wryly: “Eighty years have gone by in the blink of an eye/Now it seems that I’m not here at all.”
Having spent an hour in her company, all I can add is that Peggy Seeger, as she enters her 90th year, remains a vibrant, vital, very visible woman.
