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(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)
Summary.
William "Smokey" Robinson was both a gifted
melodic composer, a fluent vocalist and a creative arranger. He composed
the Miracles' Shoparound (1960),
Mary Wells' My Guy (1964),
the Temptations' My Girl (1965) and Since I Lost My Baby (1965),
Marvin Gaye's Ain't That Peculiar (1965) and
I'll Be Doggone (1965).
The Miracles were his own group, and they delivered his best material:
You Really Got A Hold On Me (1963), The Tracks Of My Tears (1965), I Second That Emotion (1967) and
the baroque, breathtaking The Tears Of A Clown (1970).
Robinson did not merely create catchy refrains, he created mini-dramas
or mini-symphonies.
Full bio.
(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)
The ranks of Tamla's romantics were led by the groups of Smokey Robinson, a boy from Detroit who had been performing in the city's clubs since 1957. In fact, Shoparound (1960) by his Miracles was the song that turned Motown into a nationally recognized label. Robinson was a sharp and sophisticated songwriter, endowed with a high and pure voice comparable only to that of Sam Cooke. The first vehicle for his compositions had been Mary Wells, who scored hits with his songs You Beat Me To The Punch (1961), Two Lovers (1962), and above all My Guy (1964). The Miracles, with him on vocals, resurfaced only with I Second That Emotion (1967), reaching their peak in The Tears Of A Clown (1970), their exuberant melodic masterpiece, a tour de force of rhythms (vaudeville, military march, circus parade), arrangements (trombone, flutes, harpsichord), and vocal harmonies (interwoven choruses), before concluding their career with the disco novelty Love Machine (1975). As a producer, both for the Miracles and for the The Temptations, for whom he wrote some of his masterpieces such as The Way You Do The Things You Do (1964), My Girl (1965), and Since I Lost My Baby (1965), Robinson represented the more progressive wing of Tamla, opposed to the more commercial wing of the H-D-H trio. While H-D-H sought spectacular impact through orchestration and fast rhythms, Robinson devised more complex and penetrating sonic architectures, blending together genres as distant as street-band music and doo-wop, soul crooning and gospel call-and-response. Robinson gave his best in the painful stories of You Really Got A Hold On Me (1963) and The Tracks Of My Tears (1965), where his falsetto rich in high notes found its finest expression. The fascination of his songs lay in the contradiction between the exuberant depiction of love and the melancholy reflections that sprang from it (the tears of a clown is in fact his most explicit metaphor). He also wrote Ain't That Peculiar (1965) for Marvin Gaye. Later, as a solo artist, he would have a couple of hits, Cruisin (1979) and Being With You (1981), though neither matched the level of his earlier work.
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