Berry Gordy's best friend and Motown's secret weapon. Smokey Robinson wrote thousands of songs -- for the Miracles, for the Temptations, for Mary Wells, for Marvin Gaye -- and every one of them sounds like a letter you wish someone had written you. He wrote love like it was a wound he kept reopening. "The tracks of my tears," he sang on the Miracles' 1965 masterpiece, and the image was more than a metaphor -- it was a diagnosis. Bob Dylan called him America's greatest living poet. Dylan doesn't hand out compliments. Smokey just smiled that soft smile and wrote another one.

He grew up in Detroit's North End, a few blocks from Diana Ross, and formed the Miracles while still in high school. Gordy heard them in 1957 and recognized something rarer than talent: a songwriter who understood that a pop song could be poetry if you cared enough. Shop Around was Motown's first million-selling single. You've Really Got a Hold on Me. Ooo Baby Baby. The Tears of a Clown. I Second That Emotion. Smokey wrote them, produced them, and sang them in a falsetto that sounded like it was always about to break but never quite did -- an ache suspended in amber.

He wrote The Tracks of My Tears in about an hour. The Miracles recorded it. Aretha covered it. It's been making people cry for 60 years. The craftsmanship is invisible, which is the hardest kind: the way the melody rises on "closer than the street lights," the way the backup vocals answer the lead like a Greek chorus, the way the song never resolves its sadness because real sadness doesn't resolve. Smokey Robinson wasn't just Motown's poet laureate. He was the man who taught the factory that soul wasn't just a sound. It was a sentence.

He left the Miracles in 1972, stepped back from performing, and became Motown's vice president -- a suit in an office, the songwriter as executive. The solo career had its moments -- Being with You, Just to See Her -- but the magic was in the 1960s, when he was writing hits for the Temptations and Mary Wells and Marvin Gaye simultaneously, turning out classics at a pace that now seems impossible. He's still out there, still performing, still that gentle smile. The voice has deepened. The songs haven't aged a day.