Roberta Flack's "First Time Ever..." was 50 Years Ago

The first time ever I saw your face,
I thought the sun rose in your eyes.... - Ewan MacColl, 1957

Singing those lines at the piano, Roberta Flack set such a slow tempo that the producer of her debut album 50 years ago asked, "Ok, so you don't care if it's a hit?" She replied, "No sir." (Credited in Wikipedia to Flack's interview with Elinor J. Precher, Louisville Courier - Journal, 11/11/1983.)


But if Flack didn't care to make a hit, and the producer didn't care enough to stop her, then what did they care about? Art.


Flack's artistry begins with her unique voice, and how she modulates it. Whether she belts high notes or coos from her low range, she has the same warm, smokey timbre; she sustains long lines, and keeps them straight, using vibrato or the ornamental bending of notes only sparingly. At her tempo, in the space between "first" and "time," we hear the singer's tongue on the teeth for each "t," sounding both tender and sensuous. Roberta Flack's slow crescendo from the opening whisper to a wide - open melisma on "rise" mirrors the lyric's dawning sun. By the time she gets to "the first time ever I lay with you," we're ready for the earth to move.


"The First Time..." wasn't a hit until director Clint Eastwood used it in his film Play Misty for Me. The song went to #1 in 1972, and the album First Take climbed the Billboard charts.


I didn't like the song. Too slow. Too intimate. (I would have said "Weird.") I'm a late Boomer, 10 years old when Flack recorded the song, 12 when it played on the radio, absorbed in my comic books, TV, and upbeat pop music.

But even I was aware of a counter - culture of albums, clothes, "experimental" movies and plays, weird poetry, "underground" comics -- things that older boomers bought to express contempt for the commercialism of the 1950s. And I was aware of the Beatles, on their pedestal of art and experimentation above merely mortal rock groups.

This was continuation of a development in pop culture from the 1950s. With the advent of the long - playing record (LP), singers and producers experimented with making albums more than a collection of dance tunes and ballads. They could be intentional about the sequence of songs they chose to perform; they could break the 4 - minute limit to 45 - rpm "singles"; they could make a statement about themselves and the world. Already, in the late - 50s, Sinatra with arranger Nelson Riddle had made albums with themes (travel, loneliness, young love); in the mid - 60s, Beach Boys and Beatles won both commercial success and critical esteem for technical innovations and thematic connections on their albums Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper; in 1971, Marvin Gaye would release What's Going On?, a sound collage of interlocking musical motifs and social commentary.


So Roberta Flack in First Take, enabled by producer Joel Dorn, could still sell albums without making concessions to pop tastes. The album opens with Gene McDaniel's "Compared to What?", each verse targeting a different aspect of life in America, ca. 1969, such as the President with his war, "Folks just don't know what it's for," and this bitter couplet: "Unreal values, crass distortion / Unwed mothers need abortion." Flack pounds the chords and sneers the refrain - "Keepin' it real - but, compared to what?" Waiting for the next song to start, we barely hear an isolated plucked note on string bass, a long silence, then another. When Flack sings, the lyrics are Spanish, a poem "Angelitos Negros" by Andres Eloy Blanco that challenges a black painter who adorned a church with conventional images of white cherubs. Flack sings, (here in translation), "Even if the Virgin is white / Paint little black angels for me / Since they also go to heaven." For more than five minutes the song builds with Spanish guitar and violin, until Flack slips into wordless vocalese around the sixth minute of the track, and full strings play an orchestral apotheosis for the title's "Angelitos Negros," little black angels.

In 1973, when Roberta Flack made number one on the Billboard Charts with "Killing Me Softly," I bought the album, partly for the cover picture of Flack at a grand piano. (It's actually a grand piano superimposed on a photo of Flack standing at a microphone on stage.) By then I was into Carole King, Carly Simon, and Melissa Manchester - singer / songwriters who played piano. I'd memorized Flack's title song (music by Charles Fox, lyrics by Norman Gimbel), singing it with the radio in Dad's car on the way to school every morning (Lord, bless Dad for tolerating that). I learned the upbeat numbers on Flack's album -- a honky - tonk crowd pleaser called "When You Smile"; a funky break - up song "No Tears (In the End)" ; and "River," a hand - clapping Gospel number for the Age of Aquarius: "There's a river somewhere, / Flows through the lives of everyone." But on the more numerous slow songs, I could not keep up with Flack's long lines. For the song "Conversation Love," while she sustained each line, I gulped for air two or three times:

Throw sad reflections to the wind where they belong
Surprising things will rise to the top
And hand-painted dreams flow... (Hear "Conversation Love" on Youtube here.)

I learned from that album how to appreciate a slow cumulative effect. Flack's 10 - minute long arrangement of Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne" includes ruminative piano, incantatory singing, a driving rhythm, and, near the end, a windstorm of strings playing scales: mysterious, sensuous, and, in the end, epic. I still don't know what it's talking about, but I've always had the sense that this was deep. I love it.

So now, nearly 50 years later, I've listened to First Take. It sounds fresh and authentic, not like a relic. To appreciate it takes concentration, patience, and an open mind: it's not background music.  Though Flack demands less of us in her easygoing recordings of standards in the 1990s and Beatles songs  a few years ago,  her voice retains its power and smokey beauty.

My Blogposts on related topics:
• "Carole, Joni, and Carly in Context" (07/04/2012)
  
• Melissa Manchester (04/06/2015
  
• "Discovering Joni Mitchell 40 Years Later" (07/06/2012)
  
• "Beatles, for Boomers" (07/05/2019).