Smokey Robinson walked into Motown carrying a notebook of 100 high school songs
After a failed audition for Brunswick Records in August 1957, a Detroit teenager showed Berry Gordy a notebook holding 100 songs he had written in high school. Gordy was impressed, and Smokey Robinson went on to give Motown its first million-selling hit and to write My Girl.
William Robinson Jr. was born in Detroit's North End on 19 February 1940. The nickname came from his favourite uncle, Claude, who took him to cowboy films and gave him the cowboy handle Smokey Joe; around age 12 he dropped the Joe. His mother died when he was 10, and he moved in with his older sister Geraldine, her husband and their 10 children. A few houses along Belmont lived the young Aretha Franklin, whose piano playing he overheard while visiting her brother.
In 1955 he started a doo-wop group, the Five Chimes, with Ronald White and Pete Moore; renamed the Matadors and then the Miracles, it took in Claudette Rogers, whom he married in 1959. That year he began studying electrical engineering but dropped out after two months once the group's first record appeared. Shop Around, cut in late 1960, became the label's first million-seller, and from 1960 to 1970 he steered the Miracles to 26 Top 40 hits, with The Tears of a Clown their lone number one in that stretch.
He wrote for the rest of the roster too: My Guy for Mary Wells, My Girl and Get Ready for the Temptations, Ain't That Peculiar for Marvin Gaye. The Beatles covered You've Really Got a Hold on Me, and George Harrison later recorded Pure Smokey in tribute. By the mid-1960s he was also a vice president of the company. He meant to quit touring in 1969, yet the success of Tears of a Clown kept him with the group until July 1972.
The solo years started slowly. His 1975 album A Quiet Storm lent its name to a whole radio format created by DJ Melvin Lindsey. When writer's block set in, his old guitarist Marv Tarplin handed him a tune that became Cruisin', his first solo pop Top 10, and in 1981 Being with You went to number one in Britain. Just to See Her earned him a first Grammy in 1988, and the Library of Congress gave him its Gershwin Prize in 2016.
Source: Smokey Robinson
