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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. 5 Having played at the first Cambridge Folk Festival in 1965, Peggy's taking this year’s US legend slot with her musician sons and daughter-in-law Credit: Laura Page 5 Roberta Flack version of First Time Ever horrified us.

.. but I got to like it, says Peggy Seeger Credit: Getty 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. 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 .

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