Smokey Robinson walked into an audition with a notebook of 100 songs

William Robinson Jr. was born in Detroit in 1940. As a child he answered to Smokey Joe, a cowboy name his uncle Claude gave him because the boy loved westerns; he dropped the Joe at about 12. His mother died when he was 10, and he moved in with his older sister Geraldine and her family. He grew up several houses away from Aretha Franklin on Belmont.

Music took hold of him through radio, where he heard Nolan Strong & the Diablos and Billy Ward and his Dominoes. In 1955 he formed the Five Chimes with the friends Ronald White and Pete Moore. They became the Matadors, joined by Bobby Rogers and then by Claudette Rogers, who married Smokey in 1959, and the guitarist Marv Tarplin came on board in 1958. In time they became the Miracles.

The big moment arrived in August 1957. After a failed audition for Brunswick Records, Robinson met the songwriter Berry Gordy. He had brought along a Big 10 notebook holding 100 songs he had written in high school, and Gordy, while impressed by his voice, was even more impressed by the songwriting. That meeting was the start of Robinson's long association with Motown, where he served as the Miracles' frontman, chief songwriter and producer.

He led the group until 1972, when he retired from it to concentrate on his role as vice president of Motown Records, and then he returned as a solo artist the following year. He left Motown in 1999. Among the honours: induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize in 2016, and two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one as a solo artist in 1983 and another with the Miracles in 2009.