Growing up, the odds were stacked against young William Robinson. His family lived in one of the roughest parts of Detroit – awash with “alcoholics, junkies, prostitutes, everything” – and he lost his mother Flossie when he was ten. And yet the boy nicknamed Smokey by his Uncle Claude would go on to help define the sound of classic soul. Smokey’s string of achingly tender Motown hits – tackling love, loss, and heartache in his silken falsetto – became the musical backdrop to millions of teenage lives. Tracks Of My Tears, I Second That Emotion and The Tears Of A Clown are just some of the priceless gems he notched up with the Miracles.
Smokey’s parents separated when he was three. Seven years later, just as he was leaving for school, his mother called him to her bedside and told him: “I want you to always be a good boy.” She died hours later from a brain haemorrhage. His eldest sister moved back to the house – a bungalow duplex in Belmont Street. “We had eleven kids in the house, sleeping three to a bed,” he tells me. “I didn’t know I was poor until I got out of there; I didn’t realise how bad it was because everybody in the neighbourhood was in the same situation. We didn’t have money, but we had love.”
Incredibly Robinson’s North End neighbours included Diana Ross, who lived four doors away, Aretha Franklin, “just around the corner”, The Four Tops, Bettye LaVette and The Temptations. So much talent. Was there something in the water? “It was just fate,” he says. “It was meant to be.”
Smokey, 85, was six when he wrote his first song. “I was in a school play, playing the part of Uncle Remus, and the teacher was playing a melody on the piano. I asked if I could write some words for it.” He sang the resulting number, Goodnight, Little Children, on stage. “The way my mother reacted, you’d have thought I was Cole Porter,” he laughs.
His first group were The Five Chimes. “We would harmonise on street corners and basement steps anywhere when I was 11. Just me and guys in the neighbourhood. We wanted to sing to attract girls,” he says, his green eyes sparkling.
The Five Chimes became The Matadors, then The Miracles in 1955 and Smokey Robinson & The Miracles ten years later. “Our first professional gig was an hour’s drive away, in Ypsilanti,” he recalls. “We played with Ben E. King, then we played the Apollo in New York, the Ray Charles show. It was horrible, they didn’t boo us but we were terrible. We were the first act on. We didn’t have any arrangements for the orchestra and the guy running the Apollo was bitching about it.
“Ray Charles came in, at 7am, and wrote them for us, then and there off the top of his head. Incredible.”
They auditioned in front of Jackie Wilson’s managers in 1957. “They said we were too much like the Platters, and we didn’t need another Platters. Then they said I and my girlfriend” – Claudette Rogers, later his first wife – “should become like [50s R&B duo] Mickey and Sylvia, but then we’d be another Mickey and Sylvia…”
That was the day he met Berry Gordy, the main songwriter for his idol Jackie Wilson. “I knew his name because he co-wrote Reet Petite. After the auditions, he asked to see my songs. I had about a hundred, he liked two. I’d say, ‘What’s wrong with this one?’ and he’d say, Well, you left off this, or you didn’t complete that’. He made me see a lyric is like a short story, with a beginning, a middle and an end. We struck up a friendship and he started to manage us.” Gordy, then an assembly line worker at Fords, formed his own local record label, Tamla, which became Motown. “He’d put the records out with other local labels in different areas, but we got nothing back. So I encouraged him to go national,” says Smokey. “He was very determined young man, brilliant and very motivated. Not many guys with a high school education could do what he did.”
Robinson was 18 when he recorded his first single, Get A Job, and 20 when he and Berry co-wrote the Miracles’ first hit, 1960’s Shop Around – Motown’s first million-selling single. His next US Top Ten smash was 1962’s You’ve Really Got A Hold On Me, covered by the Beatles on their second album a year later. He had the Fab Four when the Miracles played the Cavern Club in Liverpool. “They told me they had grown up listening to black music, they were the first white artists I’d heard say that.”
Motown defined itselt as “The Sound Of Young America”, it was music for everyone. Gordy made Robinson Motown Vice President in 1963. Smokey went on to write scores of songs for other artists, including My Guy, a 1964 US chart-topper for Mary Wells, The Way You Do the Things You Do for the Temptations and Ain’t That Peculiar for Marvin Gaye in ’66. “I was living my dream,” he says. “It didn’t seem like work, it wasn’t work-work, because it was joy at the same time.”
Pop genius Robinson has written or co-written more than 4,000 songs. The Miracles’ first UK success was Tracks Of My Tears which went Top Ten in 1965. The Tears Of A Clown, their biggest hit, came after Stevie Wonder gave Smokey a tape saying he had some great music but couldn’t find words or a melody line for it.
“The music was awesome. What I got immediately from that opening was a circus vibe. But what could I write about a circus that would be heart-jerking enough for people to care? Then I remembered the story of Pagliacci. Yeah, sure, he goes out and makes everybody laugh, but after the show, he goes to his dressing room and he cries. Everybody loves him as Pagliacci the clown, but nobody loves him as a man.”
Smokey stepped away from The Miracles in 1972 and stopped touring to spend more time with Claudette and their two children.
A year later he was back with his solo album Smokey. He’s touring the UK this summer, for the first time in 15 years, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his third, 1975’s A Quiet Storm, a mature soul masterpiece that spawned the quiet-storm musical genre.
Robinson’s set will mix songs from that album with classics from his timeless cannon. And every night people will sob along to Tracks Of My Tears.
“We first came to the UK in 1962,” he recalls. “We did TV initially – UK audiences seemed to have more knowledge about the music, who played second violin on this song…But audiences everywhere are great.”
In 1981, Smokey’s biggest solo hit, the chart-topping Being With You, was followed by the treacherous lure of cocaine. He was hooked until 1986 when he was taken to a church near his home in Los Angeles. The pastor told him God had told her he was coming and told him things he hadn’t shared with anyone. He said, “I walked in that church an addict, and I came out free.” He hasn’t touched narcotics since, and rarely drinks after seeing how booze transformed his father.
Spiritual rather than religious, Grammy-winner Smokey meditates, does yoga and is strictly vegetarian. He relaxes on the golf course and says sweets are his only vice. But he has owned up to numerous flings during his first marriage, including a year-old affair with Diana Ross. After he admitted fathering son Trey with another woman in 1984, he filed for legal separation and was divorced by 86. He’s been happily married to his second wife, interior designer, Frances Gladney since 2002.
Smokey has no plans to stop performing. “I can’t find anything that tops showbusiness. I love concerts because I get a chance to be with the people, to see the fans, to be one-on-one with them, to have a good time with them. They’re singing the songs back to me. It’s wonderful.
“I’m looking forward to coming over and being with you. Love and enjoy yourself. We will have a great time.” *Smokey Robinson’s The Legacy Tour Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of A Quiet Storm is in July 2025 and Smokey plays the Love Supreme Jazz Festival in East Sussex on July 5 lovesupremefestival.com
