What an incredible thing – to be the inspiration for ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face‘ – and to hear it sung by it’s author Ewan McColl just the once – and that down a crackly transatlantic phone line in 1957 when Peggy requested a love song to perform on an American tour. The couple were estranged at the time, Peggy Seeger unwilling to carry on an affair with a married man but the song was, she says, “a hell of a way to woo me back!”
Peggy Seeger has recorded a new version of the song with just a simple piano accompaniment, and she says, reflecting on the changing mood of the song, “I’ve had two life partners, one male and one female, and I have three children and 9 grandchildren. I’ve come to realise that the lyrics can be interpreted in so many ways. Ewan wrote the tune to mimic the heartbeat of someone wildly in love and I used to feel like a soaring bird when I sang this song. Now I’m grounded within it and that makes me happy.”
