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The Temptations Sing Smokey
The Temptations
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The story behind
There are songs that need no introduction: they play, and the world recognizes them instantly. My Girl is one of those. It doesn’t matter if you’re in Tokyo, Berlin, or Buenos Aires; the moment those first three bass notes sound, people hum along without thinking. The hook isn’t in the lyrics, but in that clean guitar riff that repeats like a heartbeat, and in the voice of David Ruffin, which rises and falls between sweet and deep with an effortless naturalness few have matched. What’s curious is that this sound, which now feels like an eternal classic, was born from a change of plans: Smokey Robinson had written the song for his own group, The Miracles, but it ended up in the hands of The Temptations because Ruffin, newly arrived in the quintet, left an impression impossible to ignore.
The recording took place over two sessions in September and November 1964 at Hitsville USA, Motown’s studio in Detroit, where the Funk Brothers team — the most famous session band almost no one remembers by name — built the foundation: James Jamerson set the tone with those bass lines that seem to breathe, while Robert White wove the guitar riff everyone hums. Ruffin, who had previously been just another voice in the chorus, became the face of the track, and the group, instead of following Robinson’s script, improvised the “hey hey hey” and the echoes of “my girl” that are now essential to the song’s DNA. The result was so polished that My Girl not only topped the charts in 1965 but also made its way into the National Recording Registry of the U.S. Library of Congress in 2017, a testament to how three and a half minutes can define an era. Even decades later, when the film revived it in 1991, it returned to the charts—this time in an adult contemporary version—proving its magic never fades.