Music

Forever No. 1 is a Billboard series that pays special tribute to the recently deceased artists who achieved the highest honor our charts have to offer — a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 single — by taking an extended look back at the chart-topping songs that made them part of this exclusive club. Here, we honor the late Roberta Flack by looking at the first of her three Hot 100-toppers: Her singularly exquisite and rapturous reading of the folk ballad “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.”

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“When you express your feelings about the first time you ever see a great love, you don’t rush the story,” the legendary Roberta Flack told Songwriter Universe in 2020 — a sentiment applicable to her breakthrough rendition of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” in multiple ways.

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One is that the song certainly took its time catching on commercially. Flack, who died on Monday (Feb. 24) at age 88, had shown prodigious musical talent as a vocalist and pianist from an early age, becoming one of the youngest Howard University students ever when she was accepted to the HBCU at age 15. By the late 1960s, she was already both a music teacher and a live performer of some renown, setting up residence as the in-house singer at the D.C. restaurant and jazz club Mr. Henry’s — where she was discovered by American jazz great Les McCann, who immediately hooked her up with Atlantic Records. An album was quickly recorded and released: 1969’s First Take, an eclectic and inspired debut whose centerpiece was its soulful rendering of the ’50s folk song “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.”

Initially, the song went nowhere. It was not even released as a single originally, with the label instead opting to release a split of her funky version of McCann’s jazz standard “Compared to What” and a more meditative cover of singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen’s ballad “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.” But that single also caught little mainstream attention, and the critically well-received First Take debuted at an underwhelming No. 195 on the Billboard 200 dated Jan. 31, 1970, held at that position for a second week, then dropped off the chart altogether. Flack’s next two albums, 1970’s Chapter Two and 1971’s Quiet Fire, would fare better, both reaching the top 40 — and by the latter’s release, Flack had also found Hot 100 success as a partner with Atlantic labelmate Donny Hathaway, with their duet on the Carole King-penned “You’ve Got a Friend” peaking at No. 29 on the chart in August ’71, just two weeks after James Taylor’s version topped the ranking.

But it was “The First Time” that would, belatedly, mark Flack’s true commercial breakthrough. In October 1971, the recording was featured — in full — during a love montage from the movie Play Misty for Me, Clint Eastwood’s proto-erotic thriller directorial debut. The film was only a modest hit, but its use of “First Time” made for arguably its most striking moment: Two-thirds of the way through the movie, which predominantly focuses on Eastwood’s radio DJ character David seducing and then being stalked by overzealous fan Evelyn (Jessica Walter), the movie takes a long break from the mounting tension to feature David rekindling his romance with on-and-off girlfriend Tobie (Donna Mills). The sequence, of long walks on the beach and through the woods, of making love by the fire and in the grass and even of skinny dipping in the brook, could easily have been mawkish and eye-rolling — but soundtracked by the spellbinding “Face,” it instead served as the film’s emotional climax, and increased public demand for the song to the point where it was finally released as a single, three calendar years after first appearing on First Take.

The other way that Flack certainly didn’t rush the story of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” was in her version’s peculiar arrangement, and its decidedly nontraditional vocal interpretation. Dozens of “First Time”s had already been released by the time of Flack’s spin — dating back to when British songwriter Ewan MacColl first penned the song for Peggy Seeger (half-sister of Pete) to sing back in 1957 — but most of them ran somewhere in the two-to-three-minute range, moving briskly from one verse to the next. Flack slowed the song’s tempo to a candlelit crawl, let the bookending instrumental section stretch out at both ends, and sunk her teeth so deep into the vocal that she turned it from a love song into something more closely resembling a choral hymn.

By the time she was done with it, the album version ran nearly five-and-a-half minutes; producer Joel Dorn asked in vain for her to quicken and tighten it up, saying there was no way the song would become a hit in its current state. “Of course he was right,” Flack would later comment, “until Clint got it.” Still, when Eastwood first reached out to Flack to use her song, she assumed she would need to re-record a peppier version to make it more soundtrack-ready — this was still the era of Paul Newman and Katharine Ross frolicking on a bicycle to “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.” Eastwood, a jazz aficionado and part-time musician himself, instead assured her that he wanted the song exactly as it was.

In truth, once you hear Roberta Flack’s take on “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” it’s close to impossible to imagine it any other way. Upon entering the song with the title phrase — nearly 40 seconds in, after the fire is lit by some gentle acoustic strumming and atmospheric cymbal brushing — Flack immediately makes the song her own. While most previous renditions had essentially combined “First Time” into a quick “firstime,” Flack takes great pains to enunciate each “t” — “The firsT… Time….” — and then lingers on each word of “…ever I saw your face…” about a half-beat longer than you’d expect, letting the phrase spill all over the measure, in a way that no doubt infuriated those who’d later transcribe it to sheet music.

Flack’s voice at first is mighty but restrained. By the end of the second line, however — “I thought the sun roooose in yoouuuurrrr eyyyyyyyyyyeeeeeees” — she’s in full flight, with a soaring, piercing delivery that fully catches the epiphany of the moment. But by the third line, “And the moon and the stars were the gifts you gave,” she’s already pulling back a little in the smiling afterglow — and by the final line, “To the dark and endless skies… my love…” it’s back to an intimate near-hush. It’s a whole emotional journey and narrative arc in the course of of one compact verse — well, compact in the number of words, though Flack’s vocal contortions stretch the four lines (with one repetition) out to a minute-21 run time.

And so “The First Time” goes for its five-plus minutes. It’s not hard to understand Dorn’s instinctive commercial hesitation with the recording: Not only is it molasses-slow and Led Zeppelin-long, but the structuring of “First Time” is absurdly unconventional for a pop song. It’s just three nearly identical verses and no chorus, with minimal band backing, and only two total mentions of the full title phrase — one at the beginning and one at the end. There’s no particular hook or refrain to speak of, either vocally or instrumentally, and no attention-grabbing shifts in dynamics, no swelling orchestral climax or show-stopping closing vocal runs. Anchored by anything less than one of the great vocal performances in all of 20th century popular music, “First Time” should have been a complete nonstarter on the charts.

But, well, guess what. Flack renders “First Time” with a painter’s detail and a preacher’s passion, a vocal of absolutely disarming clarity and unnervingly visceral feeling. Her vocal elevates the song far beyond even its folk roots to something far more traditional, a canticle, a spiritual. (Flack has referred to the song as “second only to ‘Amazing Grace’” in its perfection.) The song reflects the ecstasy and fulfillment of romantic and sexual union no problem, but also feels like it has its sights set on capturing something even deeper, more elemental — despite the song’s obvious references to physical love (“the first time ever I kissed your mouth,” “the first time ever I lay with you”), Flack said she connected with the song due to its universality, feeling it could just as easily be about “the love of a mother for a child, for example.” Her later-revealed claim that her performance on the record was most directly inspired by her love for her recently deceased pet cat feels so unexpected that it almost has to be true.

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It’s not surprising that Flack’s “First Time” would absolutely knock viewers sideways when showcased — again, in its 5:22 entirety, almost like a mid-movie music video — during such a sentimental stretch of Play Misty for Me. Consumers and radio programmers snapped up the single (with a minute lopped off its runtime, mostly taken from its ends) upon its early 1972 release; the song debuted at No. 77 on the Hot 100 dated March 4, and topped the charts just six weeks later, knocking off America’s three-week No. 1 “A Horse With No Name.” It topped the listing for six weeks total — making for both a rapid rise and a long reign by early-’70s standards — before giving way to another slow song: The Chi-Lites’ “Oh Girl.”

The song would ultimately top the year-end Hot 100 for 1972, and establish Flack as a commercial powerhouse for the era; First Take even re-entered the Billboard 200 shortly after and topped the listing itself for five weeks. It ended up being perfect prelude for the April ’72 release of Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway, her first full LP alongside Hathaway, which reached No. 3 on the Billboard 200 and spawned the top five hit “Where Is the Love?,” soon a signature song for the duo. Flack’s triumphant 1972 was later commemorated at the 1973 Grammys, where “First Time” took home both record and song of the year, and “Love” also captured best vocal performance by a duo, group or chorus.

Flack would go on to have many more hits — including two further No. 1s across the next two years — and escape what could have been a rather intimidating shadow cast by her breakout smash with impressive ease. But as far as her legacy goes as both a vocalist and a musical interpreter, she may have never topped “The First Time,” simply one of the most transcendent and timeless bondings of singer with song in all of popular music. “I wish more songs I had chosen had moved me the way that one did,” she told The Telegraph in 2015. “I’ve loved every song I’ve recorded, but that one was pretty special.”