It Was 50 Years Ago Today: “My Girl” by The Temptations
February 3, 1965
“My Girl” by The Temptations
#1 on the Billboard Hot Rhythm and Blues Singles chart, January 30 – March 12, 1965
The record topping Billboard’s Hot R&B Singles chart on November 23, 1963, seemed an unlikely contender: the bouncy bubblegum of “Sugar Shack” by Jimmy Gilmer & the Fireballs. (It wound up being the best-selling single of the year, so perhaps some degree of crossover was inevitable.) The next week, Billboard didn’t publish the R&B singles chart at all — nor would they for the rest of 1963, or all of 1964. The magazine never gave an official explanation for the chart’s suspension. Nevertheless, the fact that mainstream (white) pop and rock managed to top the chart — besides “Sugar Shack,” other 1963 R&B #1s included Lesley Gore’s “It’s My Party,” Little Peggy March’s “I Will Follow Him,” and Paul & Paula’s “Hey Paula” — indicated that the chart was diverging from its original intent. Perhaps R&B and mainstream pop had converged to the point where a genre-specific chart was redundant.
Meanwhile, as the Billboard R&B singles chart was on hiatus, an independent, black-owned label out of Detroit was beginning its ascent. Motown had already established a handful of reliable hitmakers like the Miracles and Mary Wells before the chart suspension and had even managed two novelty-ish #1s on the Hot 100: “Please Mr. Postman” by the Marvelettes in late 1961 and “Fingertips Pt. 2” by child prodigy Little Stevie Wonder in the summer of 1963. But 1964 was the year when Motown began transforming itself from a successful regional R&B label to its own genre, becoming the United States’ best line of defense against the British Invasion. It was the year that Mary Wells sent “My Guy” to the top of the charts, but, more crucially, the year the “no-hit Supremes” became the biggest female group in America.
Billboard revived the Hot R&B Singles chart on January 30, 1965, just as suddenly as it had suspended it 14 months earlier. Naturally, the first record to top this new chart was a Motown product. The Temptations were the Supremes’ male counterparts, and like their sister group, had struggled for years without scoring a hit. In early 1964, they finally crossed over into the pop Top 20 with “The Way You Do the Things You Do” (written by Smokey Robinson and Bobby Rogers of the Miracles), but it took another year for the group to emerge as top-level Motown stars.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IUG-9jZD-g
It only took one song to do it. Smokey Robinson and Ronald White composed “My Girl” as an answer song to “My Guy,” which Robinson had written for Mary Wells a year earlier. But whereas “My Guy” had self-consciously appealed to a multiracial, cross-generational pop audience, with its jazzy style and Wells’ precise elocution, “My Girl” found a way to bring the same sort of sophistication to a more soulful R&B ballad. Rather than the live-band-in-the-studio instrumentation of the past, “My Girl” has a very deliberate sound, in which the bass is distinct from the lead guitar is distinct from the horns, where each drum beat and finger snap is crisp and discrete, creating a depth of sound that envelops the listener as if it were a physical space. David Ruffin’s elegantly rough lead vocal, his first for the group, contrasted with the sweeter, more polished sound of previous Motown stars, while conveying a degree of anguish that both complemented and fought against the rich melodic instrumentation. It was a performance that single-handedly elevated Ruffin from background singer to the group’s frontman and the Temptations from solid R&B group to one of the decade’s key musical acts.
If “Where Did Our Love Go” and “Baby Love” signaled a turning point in Motown’s commercial fortunes, “My Girl” launched a new artistic era for the label. Unlike Wells’ and the Supremes’ more blatant bids at mainstream crossover, the approach that the Temptations, writer-producers Robinson and White, and house band the Funk Brothers take to integrating R&B and pop on “My Girl” feels organic. (It would be successful, too, not only topping the newly relaunched R&B chart for its first six weeks, but also the Hot 100 in for one week in March.) “My Girl” proved that upping the quantities of both soul and sophistication would not create a contradiction in terms, but would in fact yield an appealing new style of music that could effortlessly appeal to audiences across racial lines: the Motown sound.
It Was 50 Years Ago Today examines a song, album, movie, or book that was #1 on the charts exactly half a century ago.
