It just might be the most famous and beloved song ever recorded in Detroit.
And now “My Girl,” the single that gave the Temptations their first No. 1 hit while enduring as a showpiece of the 20th century music canon, is about to turn 60, with a series of celebrations on the way.
The 60th anniversary comes on the heels of a very modern milestone: “My Girl” recently notched its one-billionth stream on Spotify, propelling it into an elite class of hits at the world’s leading digital music service.
For Temptations founder Otis Williams and his current group lineup, the coming “My Girl” festivities will include a float in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade this Thursday and a host of high-profile national TV appearances in December, capped by a special Motown Museum project just before Christmas.
That Motown Museum commemoration on Dec. 21 may be the most tantalizing for music aficionados.
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The West Grand Boulevard institution, housed in Motown’s original headquarters, is releasing a new vinyl edition of “My Girl” — a glistening, ear-opening version prepared from the original studio multitrack tapes and pressed at Jack White’s Third Man record plant 2 miles south in Midtown Detroit.
When 83-year-old Williams sat down at the museum last month to take in the enhanced “My Girl” mix — with the Tempts’ harmonized backing parts now more prominent and pristine nestled around David Ruffin’s lead vocal — he broke into tears.
“I can hear every single person’s voice,” was Williams’ emotional reaction, as recounted by Paul Barker, the Motown Museum official overseeing the project.
The 7-inch record will be available in both blue and gold editions as part of a limited 2,500-copy run. The single’s A-side features spoken reminiscences from Williams, songwriter-producer Smokey Robinson and Motown arranger Paul Riser, who scored the Detroit Symphony Orchestra parts that gave “My Girl” its timeless “beautification,” as Williams says on the new release.
The new mix, recreated in the museum’s Hitsville Next studio with the aid of 2024 technology, gently teases out sonic nuances from the original.
“This will make you hear ‘My Girl’ for the first time all over again,” said Barker, who added: “Smokey had intended it as a vehicle for David Ruffin. Now it sounds like a group record.”
The Dec. 21 release will be accompanied by an afternoon of immersive tours at the museum, including Q&A discussions with Riser and playback of isolated “My Girl” tracks inside Motown's historic Studio A, where the song was recorded during three autumn 1964 sessions with the Temptations, the Funk Brothers house band and DSO musicians.
Also participating in the museum tours will be Pamela White English, daughter of the late Ronnie White, the Miracles member who contributed to the 1964 songwriting with lead composer Robinson.
Registration for the “My Girl” tours will start Dec. 7 at the Motown Museum website. The vinyl record will be available Dec. 21 via the website and at the museum's retail shop.
There’s a purpose to the timing: “My Girl” was released on Dec. 21, 1964, a day when “the winter solstice brought one of the warmest, sunniest Motown hits ever put to vinyl,” as we wrote in the Detroit Free Press in 2016 to spotlight the track’s No. 4 ranking in “Detroit’s 100 Greatest Songs.”
That Free Press project combined public voting with ballots from musicians and industry professionals, and the Temptations' hit clocked in just behind Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” and Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street.”
It’s among a multitude of accolades racked up by “My Girl” in the decades since its initial success, when it bounded up the Billboard Hot 100 to top the chart in March 1965 — 11 weeks after its release. The single went on to be inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, got slotted at No. 43 in Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” and was enshrined in the National Endowment for the Arts’ “Songs of the Century” roster of prestige in 2001.
The enduring appeal of “My Girl” was driven home this year when it was embraced by New York Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor as his batting walk-up music. Fans at Citi Field went viral with their stadium-wide singalongs of the Temptations classic, prompting the Mets to invite Williams and the Tempts to perform the song live at a key National League Championship Series game in October.
It all goes back six decades to 1964, when Robinson hatched "My Girl" as a follow-up to his breakthrough hit for the Temptations, “The Way You Do the Things You Do,” while winking at “My Guy,” the Mary Wells chart-topper he’d produced that spring.
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With his sugary couplets and instantly hummable melody, Robinson had come up with a love song for the ages. As he plotted the next musical step for the Temptations’ Williams, Eddie Kendricks, Melvin Franklin, Paul Williams and David Ruffin, he made a counterintuitive decision that struck gold.
“David Ruffin had this kind of gruff tenor-baritone voice that was demanding in the group,” Robinson told the Free Press in 2016. “I knew if I could get (him) to sing something sweet, it would be a hit.”
Ruffin’s delivery, backed by his group mates' rich vocal tapestry, helped seal what Robinson calls “my international anthem as a songwriter.” It remains a staple of Robinson's own concerts, just as it does onstage for Williams and the Tempts.
Along with their Thursday Macy’s parade appearance in New York, the Temptations will celebrate the “My Girl” anniversary with segments on CNN (Thursday), “The View” (Dec. 17), “Nightline” (Dec. 18) and Sherri Shepherd’s daytime show (Dec. 18).
And the group will reunite with Robinson for his NBC holiday special, “A Motown Christmas,” airing at 9 p.m. Dec. 11 and available the next day for streaming on Peacock.
At the Motown Museum, Barker and Drew Schultz worked with five raw audio stems from the original “My Girl” recording sessions, obtained from the tape vaults of Universal Music, which owns the Motown catalog.
The batch of tracks included one with the Temptations’ isolated backing vocals — a surprise discovery for the museum team. In 1964, Motown’s studio was equipped with just a three-track system, which meant instruments and singing performances typically got packed together, leaving little flexibility for later audio separation.
But 1964's “My Girl” engineers in Detroit, perhaps thinking ahead, had saved the Tempts’ raw vocal performance before bouncing it down to one of the combined tracks.
“It was the cleanest you’ll ever hear the Temptations as a group,” said Schultz.
And so the new mix provides a revealing window into the familiar song.
James Jamerson’s famous bass guitar intro has become especially crisp and rich. Melvin Franklin’s deep voice rolls in strong and stout within the first half-minute. The tom-toms of Benny Benjamin’s drums jump out. The Detroit Symphony’s strings, arranged by Riser, shimmer and swirl with the energy of youthful romance.
The specialty single also includes the song’s outro — snipped from the original commercial release — as the voices of Kendricks and Paul Williams ring out while a snippet of saxophone, likely played by Funk Brother Hank Cosby, makes a brief and unexpected cameo.
December’s “My Girl” single is the first in a planned series of vinyl projects from the Motown Museum, aiming to explore the nooks and crannies of the vaunted song catalog with a genuine Detroit imprimatur.
“People like things that come from here,” said the museum’s Barker. “It just adds to the authenticity.”
In his interview segment on the forthcoming record, Otis Williams recounts his excited gut reaction after the 1964 “My Girl” sessions:
“Smokey, I don’t know how big this record is going to be,” the Temptations founder recalled saying to the song’s visionary. “But I think we’ve got something.”
Contact Detroit Free Press music writer Brian McCollum: 313-223-4450 or bmccollum@freepress.com.
