Peggy Seeger, 1961 - Photo by Bill Mencken
Stories of The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face for BBC Radio 4’s Soul Music.
Memories of first love, first borns and loss are stirred by The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, the timeless love song written by Ewan MacColl for Peggy Seeger, and made famous by Roberta Flack.
The activist and folk musician Peggy Seeger tells the story of her first meeting with Ewan MacColl, which would inspire him to write the song, and talks about what the song means to her today. MacColl's biographer Ben Harker explains why this song is so different from much of Ewan's other work. Julie Young talks about singing the song to her son Reagan, who had severe complex needs following a cardiac arrest as a baby, and the writer Louise Janson speaks about what the song came to mean to her as she set out on the path to becoming a mother on her own.
Writer and academic Jason King tells the story of how Roberta Flack came to cover this ballad by a Scottish folk musician, and how it catapulted her to fame. And Kandace Springs, a singer and pianist from Nashville, Tennessee, records her version of the song and talks about why the song is one of the greatest love songs of all time.