one of the most heartfelt renditions of a song ever sung
it makes me weep to hear it
there is a beautiful story behind the song:
So perfectly did Flack inhabit the song’s
intermingling of longing, lust and love that it was easy to imagine
that the song was written either by her or specifically for her. In
actuality, the song was fifteen years old by the time it reached the
mega-popularity achieved in 1972. Ewan MacColl, one of the foremost
figures of the British folk music scene, wrote the song for American
folk singer Peggy Seeger to perform.
Seeger recalled in a recent interview with Mojo
magazine that she and MacColl weren’t on the best of the terms at the
time he wrote the towering love song. “We weren’t really getting along
at the time,” she said. “After all he was married to someone else then.”
The pair would eventually marry in the ’70s, and Seeger has recently
come back around to the song after a long hiatus. “I couldn’t sing it
for 15 years after Ewan died (in 1989) but now I love to.”