“My Girl,” the 1964 hit from The Temptations, has just crossed a major streaming milestone. Today, the track hit one billion listens on Spotify. By far the group’s most-streamed song, “My Girl” joins the elite group of less than 1,000 high-streamers, and becomes one of the oldest songs on the list.
“My Girl” was the first number-one hit from The Temptations, though many more would follow throughout the 1960s and 70s. Written by Smokey Robinson, a beloved artist in his own right, and singer Ronnie White, “My Girl” was first released as a single before being included on their 1965 album The Temptations Sing Smokey. Within a month of the song’s debut, it topped both the pop and the R&B charts. In 1997, more than three decades after the song was first released, it was certified platinum, having sold more than 1 million copies in the United States.
In 2000, Robinson explained to NPR that he created the song because he wanted to tailor something to lead singer David Ruffin’s voice. “And all I needed was the right song for his voice and I felt like I would have a smash hit record,” Robinson recalled. “So I wanted to make it something that he could belt out, but yet make it melodic and sweet.” The hit proved so popular that founding member Otis Williams recalled in the same interview that when the group grew tired of performing it and tried to leave it out of their sets, the audiences grew furious. “We would never do that again.”
Of course, the popularity of “My Girl” continued throughout the years. A 1991 film starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Dan Aykroyd named itself after the track, and it was memorably performed as “My God” by a group of nuns in the 1992 film Sister Act, starring Whoopi Goldberg.