The Temptations — My Girl

Smokey Robinson's most durable piece of writing is broadly charting again, tracked across 65 country and platform charts today after a three-week absence. Robinson conceived the song as an answer record to his own "My Guy," a 1964 smash for Mary Wells, with lyrics inspired by his wife Claudette, according to uDiscover Music. It became the group's first US number-one single and remains their signature — one of three Temptations tracks, alongside "Just My Imagination" and "Papa Was a Rollin' Stone," on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's list of 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll. Its cultural afterlife is dense, most memorably lending its title and closing performance to the 1991 Macaulay Culkin film. The warm, rising major-key opening line has kept it in rotation as pure comfort listening.