The story of The Temptations

Two rival groups

The Temptations story begins in two places at once. In the Ensley neighborhood of Birmingham, Alabama, two boys named Eddie Kendricks and Paul Williams sang side by side in their church choir. The story goes that they first met in a schoolyard fight, after Paul dumped a bucket of dirty mop water on Eddie. They became lifelong best friends anyway. In 1955, with Kell Osborne and Wiley Waller, they formed a doo wop group called the Cavaliers. Two years later Kendricks, Williams and Osborne left Alabama to chase the music business. Their money only got them as far as Cleveland, where a manager named Milton Jenkins took them on and moved them to Detroit. There they became the Primes, famous around town for polished harmonies and sharp dance steps.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Primes were so popular that Jenkins built a sister act around them, a girl group called the Primettes. With a local teenager named Diana Ross among them, the Primettes would later become the Supremes, and according to the Independent's obituary of Eddie Kendricks, it was Eddie who recommended Diana. Meanwhile, across the city, another young singer was building his own act. Otis Williams was born Otis Miles in Texarkana, Texas, in 1941, and was raised by his two grandmothers before joining his mother and stepfather in Detroit at around ten or eleven. As a teenager he took his mother's maiden name and started forming groups, first Otis Williams and the Siberians, then the El Domingoes, singing wherever he could find an audience.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Otis needed a bass singer. He remembered a deep voiced boy from a group called the Voice Masters, spotted him walking through the neighborhood and ran after him with an offer. The boy was Melvin Franklin, born David English in Montgomery, Alabama. His beginnings were painful. His teenage mother Rose had become pregnant after being raped by the preacher of her family's church. Melvin's reply to Otis became part of Temptations folklore. He said he didn't know Otis, so he would have to ask his mother. Rose said yes. With Richard Street, a Detroit singer Melvin liked to call his cousin, on lead, the group signed with Johnnie Mae Matthews's Northern Records as the Distants, and in 1959 their single Come On became a local hit.[1] [2] [3] [4]

A dispute over royalties ended the Northern Records deal, and the group lost the Distants name. Around 1960, after Kell Osborne moved to California, the Primes broke up too, and Kendricks went home to Alabama. On a visit to Detroit he called Otis, who was desperate for two more singers before an audition with Berry Gordy's young Motown label. Otis offered Eddie a lead spot, and Eddie agreed on one condition. Paul Williams had to come too. The new five, Otis Williams, Melvin Franklin, Al Bryant, Eddie Kendricks and Paul Williams, called themselves the Elgins and auditioned for Motown in March 1961. Gordy signed them, but another group already owned the name, so on the steps of the Hitsville studio they became the Temptations.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The hitless Temptations

From the start each man had a job. Otis dealt with management, Melvin looked after the money, Paul planned the shows and the choreography, Al handled transport and Eddie ran the wardrobe. Their first two singles, Oh Mother of Mine and Check Yourself, came out on Motown's Miracle label with Paul singing lead. The label had a cheeky slogan promising that if it was a hit, it was a Miracle. Neither was. Gordy soon folded Miracle and moved the group to a new imprint named after himself, Gordy Records. There, Eddie Kendricks sang lead on Dream Come True, which reached number twenty two on the R&B chart in May 1962. It was their first chart entry, and for a long while it was about as good as things got.[1] [2] [3]

The group released eight records between 1961 and 1963 without a real hit, and people around Motown began calling them the Hitless Temptations. While they waited, they paid their dues as backing singers, including for Mary Wells, then Motown's biggest star, which is how they first played the Apollo Theater in Harlem. For a short time the label even considered renaming them the Pirates, and they cut a couple of songs under that name before everyone thought better of it. Then there was the one that got away. Do You Love Me was originally meant for the Temptations, but when Berry Gordy couldn't reach them, he recorded it with the Contours instead, and it became a major hit.[1] [2]

In 1963 the group began working with Smokey Robinson of the Miracles, who wrote and produced I Want a Love I Can See for Paul Williams. It didn't chart, but it became a favorite in their live show. Frustration, though, was eating at Al Bryant. He had a day job as a milkman, and he increasingly seemed to prefer it to rehearsals and gigs. In the middle of 1963, during a heated quarrel at a show, he hit Paul Williams with a beer bottle. After another onstage altercation around a Christmas show, the group fired him. Bryant kept singing with local Detroit groups, but his story ended sadly. He died of liver cirrhosis in Florida in October 1975, at just thirty six.[1] [2] [3]

His replacement had been hanging around for months. David Ruffin was born Davis Eli Ruffin in Whynot, Mississippi, in 1941, the son of a strict and at times violent Baptist minister. His mother died when he was ten months old. As a boy he sang in the family gospel group, and as a teenager he worked the circuit as Little David Bush, borrowing the surname of the minister who became his guardian. In Detroit he even lived with Berry Gordy's father and helped him with construction work on the building that became Hitsville. Ruffin followed the Temptations around and once jumped onstage with them. After he sang with them at Motown's New Year's Eve party of 1963, he was in. His brother Jimmy had also been considered.[1] [2]

The Classic Five

In January 1964 the line up that fans would call the Classic Five was complete. That same month Smokey Robinson and his Miracles bandmate Bobby Rogers gave them The Way You Do the Things You Do, with Eddie Kendricks's feathery falsetto on lead. It became the group's first Top 20 pop hit that spring, peaking at number eleven. Their debut album, Meet the Temptations, followed. But Robinson heard something special in the new man. He called David Ruffin a sleeping giant, with a voice both mellow and gruff, and set out to write the perfect song for it. On the road with the Motortown Revue, he and fellow Miracle Ronnie White came up with My Girl. The Miracles were due to record it, but the Temptations talked Smokey into giving it to them.[1] [2] [3] [4]

My Girl was released at Christmas time in 1964. James Jamerson's bass line and Robert White's guitar riff opened the record, and Smokey let the group invent their own backing vocals, because he thought they were so good at them. On the sixth of March 1965 it reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100, the group's first. It was also the first number one on Billboard's revived R&B chart. The group was playing the Apollo when a telegram arrived congratulating them, signed by Berry Gordy, the Supremes and, remarkably, the Beatles. Robinson later said that even in countries where people didn't speak English, audiences would start cheering at the first bass notes. The Library of Congress later added it to the National Recording Registry.[1] [2] [3]

Ruffin sang lead on the next run of hits, It's Growing, Since I Lost My Baby and My Baby. Meanwhile a hungry young producer named Norman Whitfield wanted the group, and Berry Gordy made him a deal. If Robinson's Get Ready, sung by Kendricks, missed the pop Top 20, Whitfield's song would be the next single. Get Ready stalled at number twenty nine. Whitfield's Ain't Too Proud to Beg had already failed twice at Motown's Friday morning quality control meetings. For the version that finally won, he pitched Ruffin's part just above his comfortable range, and Otis remembered Ruffin drowning in sweat with his glasses sliding off his face. It topped the R&B chart for weeks, and Whitfield became the group's main producer.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Whitfield pulled them toward a tougher, horn driven sound, closer to James Brown and the Stax records coming out of Memphis. The hits kept coming with Ruffin out front, Beauty Is Only Skin Deep, I Know I'm Losing You, and late in 1967, I Wish It Would Rain. Sadly, one of that song's co writers, Roger Penzabene, took his own life in December 1967, just before it became a hit. Onstage, Ruffin came up with one of the group's trademarks, a custom four headed microphone stand that let the others sing and dance without crowding around one mic. The steps themselves came from Paul Williams, their first choreographer, and Motown's dance coach Cholly Atkins, who together shaped the famous Temptation Walk.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Motown wanted its acts to appeal to everyone, and the Temptations became a crossover sensation. They appeared on American Bandstand, The Ed Sullivan Show and The Hollywood Palace, and from 1966 they were managed by Shelly Berger, who also looked after the Supremes. A pop standards album, The Temptations in a Mellow Mood, helped land them at New York's famous Copacabana. Motown even had them record My Girl phonetically in German and Italian, as Mein Girl and Solamente Lei, for European markets, and Otis later told NPR they knocked the takes out quickly. Their only live album with Ruffin, recorded at Detroit's Rooster Tail club in October 1966, reached the pop Top 10.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Ruffin out, Edwards in

Success changed David Ruffin. By 1967 he was using cocaine, missing rehearsals and meetings, and riding to gigs in his own limousine rather than with the others. When the Supremes were renamed Diana Ross and the Supremes, Ruffin demanded the same treatment, a group called David Ruffin and the Temptations. He also began asking hard questions about money, demanding an accounting from Motown. The group's management company was itself a Motown subsidiary, and even the outside accountants the group was allowed to hire could not see all the books. Ruffin had joined Motown on a separate solo contract from the others, which some felt fed the tension. He first sought treatment for his drug use that same year.[1] [2] [3]

His private life was darker still. In 1966 Ruffin began a relationship with the singer Tammi Terrell, who was opening for the Temptations on the Motortown Revue. He surprised her with a marriage proposal, and only after she announced their engagement onstage did she learn he was already married. As his drug use worsened he became violent toward her, and she ended the relationship in 1967 after he hit her in the head with his motorcycle helmet. Terrell went on to her famous duets with Marvin Gaye, but she died of a brain tumor in 1970. Decades later Genna Sapia Ruffin, the mother of his son, published a memoir that also described his infidelity and abuse.[1]

The breaking point came in June 1968. Ruffin skipped a show at a Cleveland supper club to watch a performance by his new girlfriend, Barbara Gail Martin, the daughter of Dean Martin. The other four drew up papers and fired him that month. They already had someone in mind. Dennis Edwards, a preacher's son from Fairfield, Alabama, had served in the army in Europe and then sung with the Contours, who often opened for the Temptations. He was also Ruffin's friend. Edwards later recalled that at four in the morning Ruffin knocked on his door to tell him he was leaving the Temptations, and that they were going to ask Edwards to replace him.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Ruffin did not go quietly. When Edwards was introduced to audiences in early July 1968, Ruffin jumped onstage during Ain't Too Proud to Beg, took the microphone and sang, then disappeared. He did it again and again that summer, slipping past the extra security whenever the group played one of his songs. Fans loved it. The group did not. When the stunts finally stopped, Ruffin turned on Motown, suing in October 1968 to be released from his contract. Motown countersued, and the settlement kept him on the label as a solo artist. His first solo single, My Whole World Ended, a song first intended for the Temptations, reached the Top 10 in 1969.[1] [2] [3]

Edwards's first album with the group was Live at the Copa, and then came a blockbuster team up. Diana Ross and the Supremes Join the Temptations reached number two on the Billboard album chart in late 1968, spent four weeks at number one in Britain, and gave them a number two single, I'm Gonna Make You Love Me. The two groups starred together in the NBC television specials TCB, in December 1968, and G.I.T. on Broadway in 1969. TCB earned an Emmy nomination, and its soundtrack album went to number one. For two Black vocal groups from a Black owned Detroit label, headlining primetime network television was a landmark.[1] [2] [3]

Psychedelic soul

With Edwards's rougher voice in the group, Norman Whitfield changed their sound completely. It was Otis Williams who played him Sly and the Family Stone's Dance to the Music. At first Whitfield waved it away as a passing fancy. Within weeks he had built the backing track for Cloud Nine, with wah wah guitars, a hard driving beat and the Cuban percussionist Mongo Santamaria on congas. All five Temptations traded lead lines, Family Stone style, and the song dealt with poverty rather than romance. Released in October 1968, it reached number six on the pop chart and won Motown its very first Grammy Award, for best R&B group performance. A new style had a name, psychedelic soul.[1] [2] [3]

Whitfield's lyricist was Barrett Strong, the man who had sung Motown's first hit, Money, back in 1959, and together they kept the formula rolling. Runaway Child, Running Wild topped the R&B chart in 1969. I Can't Get Next to You went to number one on the pop chart that October, and Billboard ranked it the third biggest song of the year. The Psychedelic Shack album followed in 1970, its cover imagining a hangout where people went to expand their minds, and its title track reached number seven. Then came Ball of Confusion, a restless catalogue of the world's troubles that went to number three in America and number seven in Britain.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The group was not entirely happy. Whitfield held full creative control, and the Temptations felt his long instrumental passages buried their voices. Some album tracks ran eight minutes or longer. He also liked to record the same song with different acts to see which version would hit. War first appeared on Psychedelic Shack, sung by the Temptations, before Edwin Starr took it to number one, and Smiling Faces Sometimes, another Temptations original, became a Top 5 hit for the Undisputed Truth. Meanwhile Paul Williams was falling apart. He had sickle cell disease, and a man who once drank nothing stronger than milk was, by Otis's account, now getting through several bottles of cognac a day.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The others raided and poured away his hidden alcohol, staged interventions and kept oxygen tanks backstage. A failed Detroit clothing boutique and a tax debt of more than eighty thousand dollars added to the pressure, and he refused to see a doctor. At the same time Eddie Kendricks was drifting away. He disliked the psychedelic material and missed the old ballads, he fought with Otis and Melvin, sometimes violently, and he was convinced Motown was cheating the group. He even pushed for a strike until Gordy opened the books. Back in touch with David Ruffin, who urged him to go solo, Kendricks walked out between shows at the Copacabana in November 1970 and never came back.[1] [2] [3]

Before he left, Kendricks gave the group one last gift. Whitfield and Strong had shelved a gentle ballad for a year. When the peace song Ungena Za Ulimwengu stalled in late 1970, Whitfield told Strong to dig out the song they had been playing around with, because he was recording it that day. That song was Just My Imagination, dressed in strings from members of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. The others went home at six in the morning, but Kendricks stayed for hours more perfecting his lead. On The Ed Sullivan Show in January 1971 he stood apart from the others. By the time the single reached number one that spring, he had signed as a solo artist. Otis called it Eddie's finest moment.[1] [2]

Papa Was a Rollin' Stone

The group scrambled. Ricky Owens of the Vibrations was hired to replace Kendricks, but he lasted only a few shows before being let go for forgetting his words out of nerves. The answer came from Baltimore. Damon Harris, just twenty, had grown up idolizing Eddie Kendricks and had even led a teenage tribute act called the Young Tempts, until Motown's lawyers forced a change of name. He auditioned in June 1971 at the Watergate Hotel in Washington. Otis worried that he was too young, but the others voted him in. His real first name was Otis, so he became Damon to avoid any confusion with the group's leader.[1] [2] [3]

Paul Williams's voice was ravaged, and Richard Street, the old Distants lead who now sang with a Motown act called the Monitors, had been traveling with the group to cover for him. In 1971 a doctor found a spot on Paul's liver and told him to retire. Street took his place for good, while Paul kept his one fifth share of the group's income and stayed on as an adviser and choreographer. He tried a solo single in 1973, produced by his old friend Kendricks, but Motown shelved it. On the seventeenth of August 1973, Paul Williams was found dead in a car in a Detroit alley, a gun beside him. He was thirty four. The coroner ruled it suicide.[1] [2] [3]

The new Temptations kept the hits coming. Superstar, Remember How You Got Where You Are, in 1971, was widely taken as a pointed message to the departed Ruffin and Kendricks. Then, late in 1972, came Papa Was a Rollin' Stone. Whitfield and Strong had first written it for the Undisputed Truth, whose version stalled at number sixty three. Whitfield rebuilt it for the Temptations as a brooding twelve minute epic, with an instrumental opening nearly four minutes long, built on a three note bass figure, ticking hi hat, strings and a lonely trumpet. Four singers took turns as brothers questioning their mother about a father they never really knew. Edited to around seven minutes, it went to number one on the Hot 100.[1] [2] [3]

It won three Grammys in 1973, one for the group's vocal, one for the instrumental B side credited to Whitfield and arranger Paul Riser, and one for Whitfield and Strong as writers. The sessions were bruising. Whitfield made Dennis Edwards redo his part again and again until he got the angry growl he was after. Afterward Whitfield wrote alone and grew even more ambitious, with the sprawling title track of Masterpiece in 1973. The group found him arrogant and chronically late, and resented music that drowned out their singing. Otis complained to Berry Gordy, and the partnership ended. Whitfield later left Motown and scored a smash with Rose Royce's Car Wash.[1] [2] [3]

Wilderness years

With producer Jeffrey Bowen the group made a strong start. A Song for You, in 1975, gave them two R&B number ones, Happy People, with the Commodores playing on it, and Shakey Ground, featuring Parliament Funkadelic guitarist Eddie Hazel. It also held Glasshouse, their last pop Top 40 hit. Damon Harris, though, had become a problem in Otis's eyes, questioning how the group was run and defying Berry Gordy in the studio. At the Apollo he made an impromptu speech thanking the audience for paying for the group's mink coats, cars, homes and diamonds. He was fired in 1975 and replaced by Glenn Leonard of the Unifics.[1] [2]

The next albums flopped, and Otis felt Bowen was turning the group into a backing band for Dennis Edwards. On Wings of Love, Edwards's voice dominated, and Otis claimed Bowen had told Edwards he could be bigger on his own. Edwards's cocaine use was also getting worse. In 1976, as the Temptations left Motown for Atlantic Records, Edwards was out, replaced by a young singer from Chicago named Louis Price. The two Atlantic albums, Hear to Tempt You and Bare Back, went nowhere, and in 1979 Atlantic let them go. Edwards, meanwhile, saw his own solo album shelved and ended up working for his uncle's company in Cleveland, laying concrete driveways.[1] [2] [3]

In the fall of 1978 Melvin Franklin was shot in the hand and the leg while trying to stop a man from stealing his car outside a hair salon in West Hollywood. He had left the engine running while he chatted with a friend. During the struggle the carjacker recognized him as a Temptation, pushed him out and drove away. Franklin had to miss a tour of Poland, then behind the Iron Curtain, while Otis covered the bass parts. Melvin was already fighting rheumatoid arthritis, diagnosed in 1968, which he treated with cortisone so that he could keep performing. Over time the drug weakened his immune system, and he later developed diabetes.[1]

Smokey Robinson and Berry Gordy brought the group back to Motown in 1980, and Edwards returned with them. Gordy himself co wrote and produced their comeback single, Power. The Temptations had also sung backing vocals on Rick James's Super Freak, and in 1982 James, a lifelong fan, wrote and produced Standing on the Top for a Reunion album that brought back David Ruffin and Eddie Kendricks. Seven Temptations traded lines with James, and the single reached number six on the R&B chart. The tour made money but was a strain. Kendricks's falsetto had been worn down by chain smoking, and Ruffin, still addicted, missed shows, costing the group thousands in fines. Otis let both go in November 1982.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Ruffin's troubles had reached the courts. In 1982 he was sentenced to six months in a low security prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, for failing to pay more than three hundred thousand dollars in taxes, and served four. The Temptations moved on. In 1983 they faced off against the Four Tops on the Motown 25 television special, Edwards trading hits with Levi Stubbs, a battle so popular that the two groups toured together for years afterward. Glenn Leonard left and was replaced by Ron Tyson from Philadelphia, a former Atlantic staff songwriter. Later that year Edwards was fired again, for missing rehearsals or turning up hungover. His duet with Siedah Garrett, Don't Look Any Further, became a big R&B hit in 1984.[1] [2] [3]

Former leads and farewells

The new lead was Ali Ollie Woodson, a Detroit born singer who had nearly joined back in 1977. His first single out front, Treat Her Like a Lady, which he wrote with Otis Williams, went to number two on the R&B chart in 1984, their best showing there in almost a decade. Lady Soul followed in 1986. The late eighties were a revolving door. Woodson was fired in 1987 for persistent lateness, and Edwards came back for a third spell, only to leave again in 1988 in a dispute over pay. Woodson returned. In 1988 Otis also published his memoir, simply called Temptations, written with Patricia Romanowski, the book that would shape how the group's story was told.[1] [2]

The two former lead singers, meanwhile, found unlikely champions. Daryl Hall and John Oates were longtime Temptations fans, and in 1985 they brought David Ruffin and Eddie Kendrick, who had by now dropped the s from his name, to the reopening of the Apollo Theater. Their live medley of The Way You Do the Things You Do and My Girl reached number twenty on the Hot 100 and earned a Grammy nomination, and that July the four sang Temptations songs together at Live Aid in Philadelphia. The partnership later soured, reportedly over Hall's objections to Ruffin's drug use. Ruffin's legal problems continued too, including a 1987 cocaine arrest after a raid on a Detroit house.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the eighteenth of January 1989 the Temptations were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, introduced by Hall and Oates. Six men were honored, Otis Williams, Melvin Franklin, Eddie Kendricks, David Ruffin, Dennis Edwards and, posthumously, Paul Williams. Otis later wrote that Kendricks refused to speak to him that night. They closed with Don't Look Back, Paul's signature song, dedicated to his memory. Afterward, to the annoyance of Otis and Motown, Ruffin, Kendrick and Edwards began touring together as the Former Leads of the Temptations. Audiences called them the Temptations anyway, but as Edwards put it, they did not own the name.[1] [2] [3]

In 1991 the three completed a successful month long tour of England. Ruffin had been collecting the takings from promoters, and flew home to Philadelphia with a briefcase said to hold about forty thousand dollars in British travelers' checks. On the first of June 1991, after hours at a West Philadelphia crack house, he collapsed. A limousine driver brought him to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, where he was pronounced dead just before four in the morning. He was fifty. The death was ruled an accidental cocaine overdose. At his Detroit funeral the surviving Temptations sang My Girl, Stevie Wonder and Aretha Franklin performed, and Michael Jackson offered to pay the costs.[1] [2] [3]

Eddie Kendrick had a cancerous lung removed in late 1991 and blamed thirty years of smoking. He kept touring until the summer of 1992, and died in his hometown of Birmingham on the fifth of October 1992, aged fifty two. In the early nineties Richard Street quit too, after more than twenty years, hurt when Otis angrily questioned his missed shows without knowing he had just had surgery for kidney stones. Then Melvin Franklin's health collapsed. After years of illness he suffered a series of seizures, fell into a coma and died at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on the twenty third of February 1995, at fifty two. Otis Williams was now the last original Temptation alive.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Phoenix rising

Otis carried on with a string of new voices. Ray Davis, a founding member of George Clinton's Parliaments, filled in on bass during Melvin's illness and after his death, but was diagnosed with lung cancer and left after For Lovers Only, an album of standards that included Melvin's final recordings. Ali Ollie Woodson departed in 1996 after battling throat cancer. Harry McGilberry of the Futures took over bass, the St. Louis singer Theo Peoples took over lead, and Terry Weeks joined in 1997. That line up sang in the halftime show of Super Bowl thirty two in January 1998, which celebrated the fortieth anniversary of Motown.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Later in 1998 came Phoenix Rising, the group's first million selling album in more than twenty years. Its single Stay, built on a sample of My Girl with Theo Peoples singing lead, went to number one on the urban adult contemporary chart. But Peoples was fired over drug problems before the album was even released. His replacement, Barrington Bo Henderson, ended up lip syncing to Peoples's vocals in the video for Stay. Three years later, the album Ear Resistible won the Temptations a Grammy for best traditional R&B vocal performance, their first competitive Grammy since Papa Was a Rollin' Stone almost three decades earlier.[1] [2] [3]

In November 1998 NBC aired The Temptations, a four hour miniseries based on Otis's book and produced by the former Motown executive Suzanne de Passe. It was filmed in Pittsburgh, drew big ratings, and won an Emmy for its director, Allan Arkush. Leon Robinson's performance as David Ruffin drew particular praise. But the film took liberties. It showed Ruffin's body dumped outside a hospital and left unidentified for a week, and it moved Melvin Franklin's death to his mother's kitchen. Ruffin's family, Franklin's mother Rose, Otis's first wife and the producer Johnnie Mae Matthews all sued, for defamation among other claims. The courts ruled for the defendants, and the ruling was upheld on appeal in 2001.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Dennis Edwards, meanwhile, had been touring as Dennis Edwards and the Knew Temptations. Otis took him to court, and Edwards was eventually barred from using the name, so his group became the Temptations Review featuring Dennis Edwards. Its line up would later include Paul Williams Junior, son of the original Temptation. Edwards claimed Otis spent about a million dollars trying to shut him down, while he spent eight hundred thousand trying to keep working. The official group's line up kept changing. Bo Henderson was fired in 2003 and sued for wrongful termination. The former Spinners lead G. C. Cameron joined, and Harry McGilberry was dismissed, reportedly over drugs. McGilberry died of an apparent overdose in 2006.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Legacy

In 2004, after more than four decades, the Temptations asked to be released from Motown, moving to another Universal label for Reflections, an album of Motown covers. G. C. Cameron left in 2007 and was replaced by Bruce Williamson, a big voiced gospel singer from Los Angeles. Ali Ollie Woodson died of leukemia in May 2010. On the ninth of February 2013 the Temptations received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, with Otis Williams and Dennis Edwards accepting alongside the children of David Ruffin, Eddie Kendricks, Paul Williams and Melvin Franklin. Within days two more former members were gone. Damon Harris died of prostate cancer on the eighteenth of February, and Richard Street died of a pulmonary embolism nine days later.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Dennis Edwards died on the first of February 2018, two days before his seventy fifth birthday, of complications from meningitis. Smokey Robinson mourned him as another Motown soldier gone. The group's story, meanwhile, had gone to the stage. Ain't Too Proud, a jukebox musical with a book by the playwright Dominique Morisseau, based on Otis's memoir, premiered at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2017 and became the highest grossing show in that theatre's history. It opened on Broadway in March 2019, was nominated for eleven Tony Awards and won for its choreography by Sergio Trujillo. It later ran in London's West End in 2023, and on tour across America.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Bruce Williamson, who had left the group in 2015 and gone home to Las Vegas, died of complications from Covid nineteen on the sixth of September 2020. He was forty nine. In 2021 the group marked its sixtieth anniversary with Is It Gonna Be Yes or No, a new song written by Smokey Robinson, who also sang on it, his first vocal appearance on a Temptations record since 1989. The album Temptations 60 followed in January 2022. Otis told Rolling Stone that he and Smokey had come full circle since they met as teenagers in Detroit. The line up kept evolving, with Tony Grant joining in 2021 and Jawan M. Jackson, from the cast of Ain't Too Proud, arriving on bass in 2022.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The honors keep coming. In 2023 Billboard ranked the Temptations number one on its list of the greatest R&B and hip hop artists of all time. In 2024 the New York Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor used My Girl as his walk up song, and when Mets fans sang it back to him through the playoffs, the Temptations performed it live at Citi Field before a National League Championship Series game. Across their career they have scored four pop number ones, fourteen R&B number ones and four Grammys. As of 2026, Otis Williams, now in his eighties, is still leading the group on the road, the last survivor of the five young men who became the Temptations in 1961.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The people around The Temptations

Otis Williams and Melvin Franklin. Schoolmates at Detroit's Northwestern High, they sang together from the Distants onward, and Melvin famously told Otis he would have to ask his mother before joining. Worn out by constant line up changes, the two promised each other they would never quit the Temptations, and they kept that promise. They were the only founders who never left. Melvin sang until illness stopped him in 1994 and died in 1995.[1] [2] [3]

Eddie Kendricks and Paul Williams. Best friends from childhood in Birmingham, Alabama, they reportedly met in a fight over a bucket of mop water, then sang together in church, the Cavaliers and the Primes. Eddie joined the Temptations only on condition that Paul came too. After both left in 1971, Eddie produced Paul's unreleased solo single, and he named one of his own sons Paul.[1] [2] [3]

David Ruffin and Tammi Terrell. They became a couple in 1966 while Terrell was opening for the Temptations on tour, and traveled together in Ruffin's private limousine. He proposed while still married to someone else. As his drug use grew he became violent, and she left him in 1967 after he struck her with a motorcycle helmet. Terrell died of a brain tumor in 1970.[1] [2]

David Ruffin and Dennis Edwards. Friends before Edwards ever joined, Ruffin tipped him off that he was about to be replaced, then spent the summer of 1968 crashing Edwards's shows to steal the microphone. They reconnected on the 1982 Reunion tour, binging on cocaine together after hours, and later toured as the Former Leads of the Temptations until Ruffin's death in 1991.[1] [2] [3]

Otis Williams and Eddie Kendricks. Their rift was one of the group's deepest. Kendricks resented Otis's leadership, fought him and Melvin Franklin, and walked out in 1970 believing Motown was shortchanging them. Otis still called Just My Imagination Eddie's finest moment. At the 1989 Hall of Fame induction, according to Otis, Kendricks refused to speak to him at all.[1] [2] [3]

The Temptations and Norman Whitfield. Whitfield took over from Smokey Robinson in 1966 and gave them their most adventurous music, from Cloud Nine to Papa Was a Rollin' Stone. The group, though, came to resent his total control, his lateness, and mixes that buried their voices under long instrumental passages. Otis Williams complained to Berry Gordy, and after the album 1990 in 1973, the partnership was over.[1] [2] [3]

The Temptations and Smokey Robinson. Robinson wrote and produced their breakthrough, The Way You Do the Things You Do, and their signature song My Girl, before losing the job to Whitfield after Get Ready. He helped bring them back to Motown in 1980, sang Really Gonna Miss You at Melvin Franklin's funeral, and in 2021 wrote and sang on their sixtieth anniversary single.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Otis Williams and Dennis Edwards. Otis hired Edwards three times and saw him leave three times, in 1976, 1983 and 1988. When Edwards toured as the Knew Temptations, Otis took him to court and won. Edwards was angry in 1994 when he was left off the plaques for the group's Hollywood Walk of Fame star, and the Temptations' manager replied that Edwards had nothing to do with the group anymore.[1] [2] [3]

Dennis Edwards and Aretha Franklin. Edwards was once engaged to Aretha Franklin, who said he inspired her 1972 song Day Dreaming. He later admitted he should have married her, but was scared of marrying a superstar. Instead he married Ruth Pointer of the Pointer Sisters in 1980. They divorced in 1983, and their daughter Issa later sang in the Pointer Sisters.[1] [2]

David Ruffin and Hall and Oates. Daryl Hall and John Oates idolized the Temptations and revived the careers of Ruffin and Eddie Kendrick in 1985, performing with them at the Apollo and at Live Aid. The partnership later broke down, reportedly because Hall objected to Ruffin's drug use. In 1989 Hall and Oates inducted the Temptations into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.[1] [2] [3]

The Temptations and Rick James. Rick James grew up idolizing David Ruffin and Melvin Franklin, who liked to claim the funk star as his nephew. The Temptations sang backing vocals on James's Super Freak, and in 1982 he wrote, produced and sang on Standing on the Top, their biggest R&B hit in years, shouting for the Temptations to sing on the record.[1] [2] [3]

Otis Williams and Shelly Berger. Berger began managing the Temptations in 1966, when he also handled the Supremes, and booked the television appearances and Copacabana dates that made them stars. The partnership lasted more than half a century. Berger and Otis were both producers of the 1998 miniseries, and Otis later became an executive producer of the Broadway musical Ain't Too Proud.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about The Temptations

• Eddie Kendricks's bandmates nicknamed him Cornbread, or Corn for short, because it was his favorite food. Kendricks also handled the group's wardrobe and created most of their vocal arrangements. His nickname came from his love of cornbread, and the others shortened it to Corn.[1]
• Melvin Franklin got his nickname Blue from his obsession with the Italian song Nel blu dipinto di blu, better known as Volare. Franklin's groupmates started calling him Blue because he was so taken with the Italian hit known in English as Volare. The nickname stuck for the rest of his life.[1]
• Melvin Franklin voiced a cartoon character, Wheels, in the 1984 animated series Pole Position. Alongside his work with the Temptations, the bass singer did some voice acting. In 1984 he voiced the character Wheels in the animated series Pole Position.[1]
• The Temptations recorded My Girl in German and Italian, as Mein Girl and Solamente Lei. Motown had its stars cut phonetic versions of hits for European markets. Otis Williams told NPR they learned the songs quickly and never went beyond German and Italian.[1] [2]
• Melvin Franklin's first words to Motown reissue producer Harry Weinger were a request to find the B side of Mein Girl. Weinger told NPR that when he first met Franklin, the singer asked him to track down a copy of Bluebird, the flip side of the German language Mein Girl.[1]
• David Ruffin designed the Temptations' famous four headed microphone stand. The custom stand let the backing singers sing and dance together without crowding around one microphone. The 1998 miniseries wrongly showed it arriving only after Ruffin left.[1] [2]
• As a teenager, David Ruffin helped build Hitsville U.S.A., Motown's headquarters, while living with Berry Gordy's father. Ruffin lodged with Gordy's father, a contractor known as Pops, and helped with construction work on the house that became Motown's famous studio.[1]
• David Ruffin's first record was released under the name Little David Bush. He took the surname of Eddie Bush, the minister who became his guardian, and recorded You and I for the Detroit label Vega in 1958.[1]
• Paul Williams choreographed the Supremes' famous Stop! In the Name of Love routine. Considered the Temptations' best dancer, Williams was the group's first choreographer and also devised routines for the Supremes, before Cholly Atkins took over that job for all of Motown.[1]
• Damon Harris's real first name was Otis, so he used Damon to avoid confusion with Otis Williams. Born Otis Robert Harris, the Baltimore singer joined at twenty as the group's youngest member and adopted his stage name to avoid two Otises in one group.[1] [2]
• Before joining, Damon Harris led a Temptations tribute group called the Young Tempts, until Motown forced a name change. Motown sought an injunction over the name, so the single was withdrawn and reissued under the name the Young Vandals. It reached number forty six on the R&B chart.[1]
• Richard Street was the first Temptation actually born in Detroit. Every earlier member had been born and at least partly raised in the American South. Street was born and raised in Detroit itself.[1]
• The rapper Kendrick Lamar was named after Eddie Kendricks. Lamar's first name is a tribute to the Temptations falsetto, whose soaring voice led songs like The Way You Do the Things You Do and Just My Imagination.[1]
• Edwin Starr's number one hit War was first recorded by the Temptations. The Temptations' version appeared on the 1970 album Psychedelic Shack. Norman Whitfield then cut it with Edwin Starr, who took it to the top of the charts.[1] [2]
• The instrumental B side of Papa Was a Rollin' Stone won its own Grammy. The flip side was the backing track without the group's vocals. It earned Norman Whitfield and arranger Paul Riser the Grammy for best R&B instrumental performance.[1]
• The Temptations re-recorded Get Ready for CBS television promotions in the 1990 to 1991 season. The network had been using a Get Ready for CBS slogan since 1988, and the group updated their old hit to fit the campaign.[1] [2]
• Cuban percussionist Mongo Santamaria played congas on Cloud Nine. Santamaria's congas helped give the 1968 single its new, harder groove. He later recorded his own instrumental version, which reached number thirty two on the pop chart.[1]
• Norman Whitfield first dismissed Sly and the Family Stone's sound as a passing fancy, weeks before building Cloud Nine around it. Otis Williams introduced him to Dance to the Music. Whitfield said he didn't want to go there, then changed course and launched the group's psychedelic era.[1]
• Do You Love Me, the Contours' big hit, was written for the Temptations. Berry Gordy intended the song for the group, but when he couldn't get hold of them he recorded it with the Contours instead.[1]
• Early on, Motown briefly considered renaming the group the Pirates. They even recorded two songs under that name, Mind Over Matter and I'll Love You Till I Die, before the label and the group dropped the idea.[1]
• When My Girl hit number one, the group received a congratulatory telegram signed by, among others, the Beatles. According to the group's official history, the telegram reached them at the Apollo Theater and also came from Berry Gordy and the Supremes.[1]
• Their only live album with David Ruffin was recorded at Detroit's Rooster Tail club on the third of October 1966. Temptations Live reached number ten on the pop album chart and stayed on the Billboard album chart for almost a year.[1]
• Eddie Kendricks's Keep On Truckin' made him the only Temptation to score a solo number one in America. The 1973 single, produced by Frank Wilson, topped the Hot 100. Before that, his long track Girl You Need a Change of Mind became a favorite in New York's early disco scene.[1]
• Louis Price, who replaced Dennis Edwards in 1977, later sang Edwards's parts in the 1998 miniseries. Price also played the playground legend Eddie the King Faroo in the film White Men Can't Jump.[1]
• Dennis Edwards served as an army field artilleryman in Europe before joining Motown. From 1961 to 1963 Edwards was in the United States Army, stationed mostly in Europe, before auditioning for Motown in 1966 with help from bassist James Jamerson.[1]
• The Temptations sang backing vocals on Rick James's Super Freak. They also sang on Teena Marie's It Must Be Magic before James returned the favor by writing and producing their 1982 hit Standing on the Top.[1] [2]
• Fall Out Boy had to rename a song that was originally titled after David Ruffin and the Temptations. The opening track of their 2005 album was renamed, for legal reasons, Our Lawyer Made Us Change the Name of This Song So We Wouldn't Get Sued.[1]
• Paul Williams kept receiving his one fifth share of group income after he retired in 1971. The group kept him on the payroll as an adviser and choreographer, while his replacement Richard Street was paid a salary for his first eighteen months.[1] [2]
• Birmingham, Alabama, has a memorial park dedicated to Eddie Kendricks, with sculptures of all the Temptations. Eddie Kendrick Memorial Park opened in 1999 with a bronze statue of Kendricks, figures of his bandmates set into granite, and Temptations music playing throughout.[1]
• Michael Jackson offered to pay for David Ruffin's funeral in 1991. Jackson volunteered to cover the costs but did not attend. Stevie Wonder and Aretha Franklin sang at the service in Detroit.[1]
• Dennis Edwards's duet Don't Look Any Further was later sampled on Eric B. and Rakim's Paid in Full and 2Pac's Hit 'Em Up. The 1984 duet with Siedah Garrett only reached number seventy two on the pop chart, but it became a favorite source for hip hop producers.[1] [2]
• In 1998 the singer Theo Peoples was fired before Phoenix Rising came out, so his replacement mimed to Peoples's voice in the video. Bo Henderson lip synced Peoples's lead vocal in the Stay video, and the finished album features both singers on different tracks.[1] [2]
• Cloud Nine made the Temptations the first Motown act ever to win a Grammy. The 1968 single won best R&B group performance at the 1969 ceremony. The group later won three more Grammys, plus a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013.[1] [2]
• Streets in both Detroit and Meridian, Mississippi, are named after David Ruffin. Detroit unveiled David Ruffin Avenue near his former home in June 2019, and Meridian named a stretch of downtown David Ruffin Boulevard that October.[1] [2]
• Rose Royce, Norman Whitfield's hit act on Car Wash, began as Edwin Starr's backing band at Motown. After leaving Motown in 1975 to launch his own label, Whitfield turned the band into stars. The Car Wash soundtrack won him a Grammy.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.