The Full Biography
Smokey Robinson. Singer. Songwriter. The Detroit kid who made a tenor into a Motown grammar, then spent the years after the Miracles proving a vice president could also keep writing the country's love letters.
This is his story.
The image most people still carry is a slim man at a microphone, eyes half closed, lifting a smile that is also a wound through "The Tracks of My Tears," or counting the clown's makeup in a hit that took three years to become a number one. The year might be 1965 or 1970. The group was the Miracles. What the still cannot show is William Robinson Jr. of Detroit, an uncle's cowboy nickname, a high-school harmony, a meeting with Berry Gordy after a Jackie Wilson show, and a living man who ran a label's catalog from an office while the same voice kept arriving on the radio.
He was born on February 19, 1940, in Detroit, to William Robinson Sr. and Flossie. The father was not a constant in the house. An uncle, Claude, who loved Westerns, hung "Smokey Joe" on the boy and then just Smokey, a cowboy name that outlived the joke. Northern High School. A vocal group that began as the Five Chimes, became the Matadors, and then the Miracles: Claudette Rogers, whom he would marry; her cousin Bobby Rogers; Ronnie White; Pete Moore. The first pressure was not a contract. It was a street corner and a city that already knew what four voices could do if the fifth wrote the words.
The door was 1957. They auditioned material for Berry Gordy, then a songwriter hustling around Jackie Wilson's orbit. Gordy heard the teenage tenor and the teenage notebook and did not let either go. He produced "Got a Job," an answer record. He built Tamla and then Motown, and Robinson was inside the building at the start, not as a hired singer only but as a writer who understood that a love song could be a piece of engineering. "Shop Around," 1960, with a Gordy opening the company preferred, became Motown's first million-selling single. The company had a sound. The sound had a poet.
What followed was not a lucky streak. It was a catalog. For the Miracles: "You've Really Got a Hold on Me" (1962), a hold so exact the Beatles picked it up and carried it to another country. "Mickey's Monkey." "Ooo Baby Baby" (1965). "The Tracks of My Tears" (1965), a smile as a disguise, a lyric the century has not improved. "Going to a Go-Go." "I Second That Emotion." "The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage." "The Tears of a Clown," written in 1967 with Stevie Wonder and Hank Cosby, a circus in a minor key that sat in the file until a British issue made it a hit and America followed to number one in 1970. He could be tender without syrup and clever without a smirk. The tenor did the rest.
For everyone else on the roster, the notebook stayed open. "My Girl" for the Temptations, 1964, a simple list that became a civic object — sunshine, a kiss, a brand-new bag, a song so clear it can survive a thousand wedding bands. "The Way You Do the Things You Do." "Get Ready." "My Guy" for Mary Wells, a number one that proved the company could put a woman at the front of the radio. "Ain't That Peculiar," "One More Heartache," "The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game" for Marvin Gaye, songs that gave Gaye a slyness before the protest years. He wrote for the Marvelettes and for anyone Gordy pointed him at. He was, by the early 1960s, a vice president of Motown — a teenage discovery who had become, while still in his twenties, an executive who could assign a song and then go downstairs and sing one. The office work is the part the oldies hours skip: A&R, sequencing, the quiet decision that a track needed another pass. Bob Dylan, at a 1965 press conference, named him as a poet he admired. The compliment has been polished, in the years since, into "America's greatest living poet." The original remark is enough. A folk singer had heard the engineering and called it verse.
I would like to write for everybody in the music business right now.Smokey Robinson
He left the Miracles in 1972, a last show, a decision to be a husband and an executive more than a man on a bus. Claudette had already stepped off the road after years of the road's cost, including the loss of children the couple did not tour as a story. The marriage would, in time, end; the songs they had made together would not. He launched a solo career in 1973 almost against his own retirement plan. A Quiet Storm (1975) gave a radio format its name: late-night, adult, a hush with a pulse. "Cruisin'" (1979) put him back on the pop chart as a man, not a group. "Being with You" (1981) went to number one on the R&B chart and near the top of the pop list. The vice president had not stopped being the tenor.
The 1980s had a private weather the ballads do not advertise. Cocaine. A stretch he has described, in interviews and in the recovery rooms he has been willing to name, as a loss of the self the songs had always sounded like they possessed. He got out. He has said so without a lecture. The voice came back. The office, as Motown moved and sold and moved again, eventually closed on his vice presidency in 1988. The catalog did not close. He kept writing. He kept touring. He married Frances Glandney in 2002. The second household is the companion of the long solo age.
Six things most people never knew
- Smokey is a cowboy name. Uncle Claude. Westerns. Smokey Joe, then the Joe dropped. The poet began as a joke in a Detroit living room.
- He was a Motown vice president in his twenties. Not an honorary title. Assignments, catalog, the downstairs voice still on the clock.
- "The Tears of a Clown" waited. Written 1967 with Wonder and Cosby. A British hit first. American number one in 1970.
- "My Girl" is his list, not the Temptations' invention. He wrote it. They sang it. The country memorized both.
- A Quiet Storm named a radio format. 1975. The hush on the late-night dial is a Robinson album title that escaped the sleeve.
- The Miracles reached the Rock Hall after he did. He went in as a solo in 1987. The group followed in 2012, after a long argument about the door.
The turn is the 1972 departure, and it is easy to miss because the public remembers the Miracles. The turn is that he tried to stop touring and could not stop writing, and that the writing became a second life as a solo man and a third life as an executive who had already taught the building how to feel. A lot of group tenors become a tribute act. He became the catalog's author on the road alone.
The later years
The years after the vice presidency are a long American honor roll that he has treated as a job, not a wax museum. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame took him in 1987. The Kennedy Center Honors came in 2006. The National Medal of Arts. In 2016 the Library of Congress gave him the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, the country's way of saying that "My Girl" and "The Tracks of My Tears" are now in the same file as the Gershwins' own engineering. He has accepted the metals as a man who still has dates on a calendar. The tribute is a Tuesday. The show is a Friday.
He still tours. The tenor is older and still exact. He still talks about Gordy as a living argument and a living friend, a Motown origin story the two of them have had to keep telling because the country keeps asking. He has recorded gospel — Food for the Spirit and the church hours that were always under the love songs. He has recorded duets. He has sat for the long interviews — public radio, the documentary crews, a Vulture hour in which he said he would like to write for everybody still in the business — and used them as a continuation of the notebook. Frances is the companion of the daily file. Children and grandchildren from the earlier household remain in the life: Berry and Tamla, named inside the company weather, and the next generation that has to share a grandfather the radio already owns. The cowboy nickname is now a registered American fact. The Motown 50th and 60th seasons put him back on network stages beside the survivors. He has been careful, in those rooms, to name the ones who are not there — the Miracles who have died, the writers who did not get the vice president's chair, Tammi Terrell, the Detroit that is no longer the Detroit of Hitsville's front lawn. Tribute is a job he takes seriously because he has seen tribute done as a medley and done as a debt. He prefers the debt. He will sing "The Tracks of My Tears" as if the smile still had to be assembled, because for someone in the room it does.
He is in his eighties. Detroit is still the weather in the voice even when the stage is Las Vegas or a symphony hall. He has not become a recluse and he has not become a host who only introduces other people's hits. He has become, instead, a working songwriter who happens to be a monument, and who will still take a pencil to a line if the line is not yet true. Friends from the Hitsville years describe a writer who could hear a hook in a conversation and have it on a tape before the conversation had cooled. Friends from the solo road describe the same ear in a quieter suit. Both are the life. The recovery is part of the file he will name if you ask and will not dramatize if you do not. He has, in this decade, still opened a show with a talking preamble about love, because love is the subject he never agreed to outgrow. He will tell a room that a song is a blessing when it arrives, a sentence that sounds like church and is also a craftsman's account of how a hook shows up uninvited. He has watched Motown become a jukebox musical and a museum and a brand, and he has stayed the man who actually wrote the list in "My Girl." The musicals can have the catalog. He keeps the pencil. On a good night the two facts occupy the same theater, and a crowd that came for the tears gets, as a bonus, a vice president who can still hear whether the band is rushing the bridge. He has been willing, in recovery interviews, to say that the 1980s almost took the voice and the marriage and the office, and that the songs did not write him out of that weather by themselves. People had to help. He names the help. He does not make a sermon of it. Then he goes back to the date. The Gershwin Prize evening at the Library of Congress put him in a room of American song the country uses for its own self-respect. He sang. Other people sang him. The night was a civic thank-you. The next Friday he was on a stage again, because the thank-you is not the job. The job is the next bridge.
New songs still arrive. A guest verse. A standard revisited. A night when he sings "Ooo Baby Baby" and a room of people who were not born in 1965 discover that a smile can be a wound. He will take the honor. He will take the date. He will take the notebook. Then he will go home. The 1960s made him a grammar. The decades since have made him an American institution that still writes in the present tense. Both are the life, and the second is the one he is living.
What he will not do is retire into a medley that only remembers "Shop Around." He will write the next love letter. He will sing the old ones as if they still had something to tell him. He will sit for the few interviews that do not require a theory of Motown as a miracle without workers. The tenor is the still. The vice president's desk, the quiet-storm hour, the Gershwin Prize, and the next date are the file. If the culture keeps only the tears, the culture has the chorus. He has the catalog.
After the spotlight moved
It moved toward younger tenors and then came back every time a wedding needed "My Girl" or a movie needed a tear track. Hitsville is a museum. The songs are not. Dylan's compliment still gets polished. Gordy still occupies the neighboring sentence. Frances remains. The Friday date remains.
He came out of Detroit, took a cowboy name, met Gordy after a Jackie Wilson show, wrote a company's first million-seller, ran the catalog from an office, left the group, named a radio format, got clean, took the Gershwin, and kept the notebook open. If you only remember the tears, you have the still. If you remember the desk, the clown that waited, and the next date, you have him.
Portrait: Ewingmason · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons