April 18 – Roberta Made Eastwood Misty

Sometimes having just one fan can be enough to get your career rolling… if that fan happens to be a star themselves. Ask Roberta Flack. She had the #1 song 52 years ago today in 1972, with a song that had been rattling around for three years and had gone all but unnoticed – “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” Thankfully, the one person who had noticed it happened to be Clint Eastwood.

By then, Flack was in her mid-30s and had put out a handful of albums, to little real avail. One wonders if she wasn’t thinking about giving up and going back to what she’d done before – teaching music. She grew up in a Baptist household in Virginia, raised on gospel music and Sam Cooke, and had shown not only a great voice but a real talent for piano while young. She got a music scholarship to university and became a teacher. Eventually though she began playing and singing in a few clubs and got signed to Atlantic Records. This song had been on her first album, First Take, which came out in ’69…to very little initial notice. The only single off it at the time, “Compared to What”, failed to chart anywhere and the album seemed to go ker-plunk. She had one minor chart hit with her friend and frequent duet partner, Donny Hathaway, with their take on Carole King’s “You’ve Got A Friend”. Like that one, “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” is a cover, but the original wasn’t well-known. It was written by Irish political folkie Ewan MacColl, who also adapted the popular version of the song “Scarborough Fair” for Simon & Garfunkel. (That song was based on an old traditional folk song but the arrangement and some of the lyrics were modernized by him.) He’d record it, as would Peter, Paul and Mary and Gordon Lightfoot, but it wasn’t ever a hit.

Meanwhile, neither was Flack’s career … until Clint Eastwood was making a movie about a DJ. He directed and starred in Play Misty For Me, and being that the main character in it worked in radio, he needed music for it. He’d heard Flack’s song and decided it was perfect for “the only part of the movie where there’s absolute love,” according to him, a love scene between him and his girlfriend, played by Donna Mills.

She willingly agreed, and Eastwood paid her $2000 for its use (not a bad amount back then for a relatively obscure song.) But she and her record producer, Joel Dorn both wanted to re-record it for him; make it faster and more upbeat like some of the earlier versions by others had been. Eastwood disagreed and kept it just as it was. A very good decision for all involved. It became one of the most popular bits of the hit movie and once in hit the screen, the song itself became very popular. Atlantic wisely put it out as a single, and this time it hit. It got to #14 in Britain, #2 in South Africa and topped the Canadian charts for three weeks. More importantly, at home, it went to #1 for six weeks, and ended up the top-selling single of the year, pushing First Take back onto the charts with it. The album went gold, the first of ten of hers to do that in the U.S. Later it would win the Grammy for Record of the Year…an award which she amazingly enough won the following year as well, for “Killing Me Softly With His Song.”

And that’s how, with luck, one fan can help you make millions of fans. And why sometimes it’s good to do a double-take on a “first take.”