A Song Roundup: The First Cut Is the Deepest

As Paul Simon once sang, every generation sends a hero up the pop charts. Every generation falls in love, too—and endures betrayals, disappointments, and heartbreak. Heartache is not an antiquity. Everyone has a first love. Everyone, in time, hurts. And most everyone becomes wary about falling in love again. It’s why “The First Cut Is the Deepest,” written by a 17-year-old Cat Stevens in 1965, has resonated through the ages.

Stevens, who’s now known as Yusuf Islam, grew up in London above his parents’ restaurant and, as a child, was initially drawn to the piano. Like many of his generation, however, the Beatles spurred him to pick up the guitar. He wrote and recorded a demo version of “First Cut” in 1965, hoping to sell it to an established artist. Although he performed in coffeehouses and pubs at the time, his dream was to follow in the footsteps of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Gerry Goffin and Carole King, and Burt Bacharach, as a songwriter. There weren’t any takers, however, until P.P. Arnold gave him 30 pounds for the song.

P.P. Arnold, for those unfamiliar with her, is one of the great unsung artists of her time. Born in 1946 Los Angeles, she married young—a shotgun wedding—and soon had two children. Her husband was abusive, however, and when she saw a chance to escape, escape she did—by joining the Ike & Tina Turner Revue in 1965. (Yes, that’s somewhat ironic.) A year later, after an Ike & Tina tour of the U.K. with the Rolling Stones, Arnold decided to leave the group and remain in London, where Mick Jagger convinced Immediate Records, which was founded by Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, to sign her. “A young black woman on her own in America in a white environment would not have been treated as well as I was in England,” she’s said of her experiences in the U.K. She initially recorded and toured with the Small Faces, then released an R&B-flavored take of “First Cut”—with the Small Faces backing her—as her debut single in April 1967. It rose to No. 18 on the British charts later that year.

That December, perhaps buoyed by the song’s success, Stevens released his own rendition on his second album, New Morning. He never released it as a single, however.

In 1973, English-born singer and actor Keith Hampshire, who was raised in Calgary and later became a deejay in the U.K. for the pirate radio station Radio Caroline, released the song as a one-off single. It topped the Canadian charts!

That same year, Linda Ronstadt sang it on a late-night ABC TV series called In Concert; she never recorded it, however.

The best known version, at least for those of us who came of age in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, is likely Rod Stewart’s, who recorded the song in Muscle Shoals, Ala., with Tom Dowd and the famed Muscle Shoals rhythm section. To his surprise, when he suggested they record it, no one else was familiar with it! In the liner notes to his Anthology collection, he recalls, “[a] phone call was made to LA and some madman had to go out and buy it, rush back, and play it on the phone with seven guys crowded ’round the receiver at the other end.” It became a key track on his 1976 album, A Night on the Town, and was released as half of a double A-side single with “I Don’t Want to Talk About It” in early 1977. 

Jump forward a generation, and Swedish rapper Papa Dee scored a surprise hit across Europe with his reggae spin on the song in 1996.

In 2003, Sheryl Crow recorded it for her multi-platinum The Very Best of collection, following the blueprint laid out by Stewart, Dowd and pals; I’d wager it’s the best known version for the under-40 crowd. It rose to No. 14 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, cracked the country Top 40, and topped both the Adult Contemporary and Triple-A charts. 

Country-flavored singer-songwriter Sara Bug covers it on her forthcoming album, Into the Blue, as well, which is what spurred this journey through the past. Hers hews close to Crow’s in feel, differentiated in large part by her distinctive vocals. It’s remarkably effective.