SONG OF THE DAY

“Tracks Of My Tears” by Smokey Robin­son & The Mir­a­cles (Going To A Go-Go, Tamla, 1965). Writ­ten by William “Smokey” Robin­son, Jr., Warren “Pete” Moore, and Mar­vin “Marv” Tarplin of “The Miracles”.

WHY TODAY?

I couldn’t stop singing this tonight! It was my lul­laby to Todd tonight, and then after he fell asleep I just kept hum­ming it to myself. I’m on a bad sleep cycle and often stay up much later than him, so imag­ine two hours of hum­ming this song while brows­ing wed­ding invi­ta­tions online until 3 am. Yeah, it was a weird night. But this song is great, don’t get me wrong there! One of my all-time favorite Motown hits! And that’s a hard thing to say for some­one who spent their for­ma­tive years (ages 6–18) in Motown. You know what? Motown deserves a Top 10 list today. Ahoy! See below!

MY TOP 10 ALL-TIME FAVORITE DESERT ISLAND LIST OF MOTOWN TRACKS (exclud­ing Ste­vie Wonder)

Okay, let me first defend why I leave out Ste­vie Won­der from a Top-10 Motown list: because I can’t pos­si­bly acknowl­edge all of the other great artists who recorded with Motown/ Tamla Records dur­ing its life­time if I include such a sem­i­nal discog­ra­phy as Ste­vie Wonder’s work. Yes, his entire career has been with that record label, so yeah, that’s five decades of stuff, and deserves its own Top 20 list. And as arbi­trary as a Top-10 list is, I logis­ti­cally couldn’t give more than a few slots to the same artist, and since I can’t even get smaller than a Top 5 by Ste­vie, he would be half the list. Since his work also spans decades, it spans gen­res and tastes, and what I’m try­ing to do is work with the sem­i­nal years known as the Motown sound. Sem­i­nal enough for ya?

So, with­out fur­ther adieu, here are my 10 favorite songs recorded at Hitsville U.S.A., songs that I love to the core:

1. “It’s A Shame” – The Spin­ners: Love this song. Love the lead gui­tar melody. Love the lyrics. Have loved this song for years. Love the har­mony of the backup singers. Love the falsetto bridge. Would def­i­nitely make a list of my 100 All-Time Favorite songs. Jeez, don’t talk to me about a list like that…it could kill me.
2. “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecol­ogy Song)” — Mar­vin Gaye: What a set of lyrics. What a thought­ful, dra­matic plea, and at the same time an unabashed, per­sonal strug­gle, all set to beau­ti­ful chords. Eek, I love this song (more than “What’s Going On?,” but only slightly). This is my favorite Mar­vin Gaye, and I obvi­ously couldn’t do a Motown Top 10 with­out remem­ber­ing the man.
3. “Ball Of Con­fu­sion” — The Temp­ta­tions: Ooh, lord, I love this song! I don’t really like the early, clas­sic Temp­ta­tions stuff (with the excep­tion of “Ain’t Too Proud To Beg”). Don’t get me wrong, I know all the lyrics to all of the Temp­ta­tions great­est hits, but I truly pre­fer their later funk-infused sounds. Truth­fully, I sing “Papa Was A Rolling Stone” on an almost daily basis, but I would want this song on the desert island over that song because I feel like if I was actu­ally on a desert island, I would pre­fer to remem­ber that the world was going to hell in a hand bas­ket, and there­fore it wouldn’t be so bad to be stuck on the island. Yeah, I’m really tak­ing that literally.
4. “Twenty-Five Miles” – Edwin Starr: This song is a moti­va­tor. It makes you strut your stuff, drive with more energy, walk it out. I need it on the island.
5. “Bernadette” — Four Tops: My favorite Four Tops song, hands down. I love the rolling motion of the song. I love the scream­ing of her name, such anguish and sin­cer­ity. This is a quin­tes­sen­tial bal­lad to me, a story through and through.
6. “Love Child” – Diana Ross & The Supremes: On the desert island, this song would serve as my comic relief. When I was a teenager, I used to call my sis­ter “Freak Child” and sing these lyrics to her. The first lyrics of the song are sung by the backup singers and go like this: “ten­e­ment slum”. Ah, sweet music to my ears. I used to sing “Freak Child, never meant to be, Freak Child, born in poverty, Freak Child, I’ll always love youuu.” And yeah, she actu­ally liked it.
7. “If I Were Your Woman” — Gladys Knight & The Pips: First found out about this song from some­one doing it on an early sea­son of Amer­i­can Idol, which used to be a good show. This song is so pow­er­ful and makes me moody and takes me over. I can’t do it as a karaoke song because it chokes me up, that’s how much this song gets me. It’s why I have to resort to jok­ing around on low notes singing Toni Braxton’s “Unbreak My Heart”. I play the clown.
8. “Smil­ing Faces Some­times” – The Undis­puted Truth: This is a very dis­tinct mem­ory for me. These lyrics hit me right at the point in ado­les­cence when I could fully under­stand them. I mean, of course the mean­ing changes over time again and again, but at age 11 or 12 or what­ever I was, I got this. In my own world expe­ri­ence, with peo­ple act­ing like friends but not really car­ing, “a smile is a frown turned upside down” really eased my mind dur­ing lonely lunches. As I lis­ten to it now, it’s not about that at all— that evo­lu­tion of mean­ing is so amazing.
9. “The Tracks Of My Tears” — The Mir­a­cles: Great song. One of the all-time great­est. Love the heartache, love the story, LOVE singing along to it. And you need songs like that on a desert island, right?
10. “Ain’t Too Proud To Beg” — The Temp­ta­tions: Todd sings this song to me a lot, so it has mem­o­ries of him deeply ingrained in it. It wasn’t a song I really liked before Todd, but that was six years ago, a life­time ago, so who cares any­more. It’s just that I don’t really like the clas­sic Temp­ta­tions sound, I like their later, funky stuff bet­ter. But yeah, love made me love this song.

Short­list:

1. “It’s The Same Old Song” — Four Tops: I love this song, but I really REALLY love “Bernadette” bet­ter, and when I think about other Motown songs I love, this ranks in at a solid #11.
2. “Do You Love Me” – The Con­tours: Clas­sic oldie, I think I’ll play it at my wed­ding. But I didn’t think I needed it on a desert island. Although a dance party might break up the monotony.…
3. “Beech­wood 4–5789″ — The Mar­velettes: Oh do I love this song! But it can get a lit­tle psy­chotic if you lis­ten to this song on repeat, so I don’t think I want to bring it onto the ol’ island.
4. “Ain’t Noth­ing Like The Real Thing” — Mar­vin Gaye & Tammi Ter­rell: I wanted my Top 10 to rep­re­sent the Mar­vin Gaye I pre­fer, and since I only had 10 picks to do it in, I chose to rep­re­sent the socially con­scious, seri­ous later works of Mar­vin Gaye, rather than the ear­lier love song duets with Tammi Ter­rell. This is def­i­nitely my favorite of their duets though, a solid #1 on that list, and much much bet­ter than “Ain’t No Moun­tain High Enough”. I’m over that song.
5. “What’s Going On?” — Mar­vin Gaye: “Mercy Mercy Me” just edged this song out, but it’s a solid Top 15 contender.

Hon­or­able Mentions:

These are songs writ­ten at Motown, and thus wor­thy of men­tion­ing. How­ever, though both these songs were writ­ten for and orig­i­nally recorded by Motown artists and song­writ­ers, their most rec­og­niz­able, chart­ing ver­sions are non-Motown cov­ers, thus I dis­qual­i­fied them from the list.

1. “Money (That’s What I Want)” — orig­i­nally recorded by Motown artist Bar­rett Strong
2. “Devil With The Blue Dress” — orig­i­nally recorded by Motown artist Shorty Long

INTERESTING FACTS (a la wikipedia)

- This song is con­sid­ered to be among the finest record­ings of The Mir­a­cles, and it sold over one mil­lion records within two years.

- In the five-LP pub­li­ca­tion The Motown Story, by Motown Records, Smokey Robin­son explained the ori­gin of this song in these words: “Tracks of My Tears” was actu­ally started by Marv Tarplin, who is a young cat who plays gui­tar for our act. So he had this musi­cal thing — [sings melody] – you know, and we worked around with it, and worked around, and it became “Tracks of My Tears.” Mir­a­cle Marv Tarplin’s ini­tial gui­tar licks at the songs’intro have become instantly rec­og­niz­able worldwide.

- “The Tracks of My Tears” was a #2 hit on the Bill­board mag­a­zine R&B sin­gles chart, and it reached #16 on the Bill­board Hot 100 chart.

- The 45 r.p.m. sin­gle also was a Top 10 hit in Great Britain, reach­ing #9 on the U.K. sin­gles chart.

- In a 2006 poll for Britain’s Favorite Break-up Songs, a Net­work 5 TV pro­gram, “The Tracks of My Tears” was voted in six­teenth place.

- Cover Versions:

- Despite the plethora of cov­ers recorded over the years, how­ever, The Mir­a­cles’ orig­i­nal is still con­sid­ered the defin­i­tive version.

- The Record­ing Indus­try Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­ica (RIAA) ranked it at #127 in its list of the Songs of the Cen­tury — the 365 Great­est Songs of the 20th Cen­tury.

- Cho­sen by Rolling Stone Mag­a­zine as #50 in its list of The 500 Great­est Songs of All Time.

- Cho­sen as one of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.

- Pre­served by the United States Library of Con­gress into the National Record­ing Registry .

- Win­ner of “The Award Of Merit” from The Amer­i­can Soci­ety of Com­posers, Authors, and Pub­lish­ers (ASCAP) for the song’s writ­ers, Mir­a­cles mem­bers Pete Moore, Marv Tarplin, and Smokey Robinson.

- Cho­sen as #5 of the Top 10 Best Songs of All Time by a panel of 20 top indus­try song­writ­ers and pro­duc­ers includ­ing Hal David, Paul McCartney, Brian Wilson, Jerry Leiber, and oth­ers as reported to Britain’s Mojo music magazine.

- “The Tracks of My Tears” was fea­tured in the Viet­nam War film Pla­toon in 1986, and it was also included in the sound­track of the movie The Big Chill in 1983.

- On May 14, 2008, the song was selected for preser­va­tion by the United States Library of Con­gress as an “cul­tur­ally, his­tor­i­cally, and aes­thet­i­cally sig­nif­i­cance” to the National Record­ing Registry.

- The track was pro­duced by “Smokey” Robinson

- Other instru­men­ta­tion on the track was pro­vided by The Funk Broth­ers and the Detroit Sym­phony Orches­tra (DSO, BABY!!).

VIDEO OF THE DAY