Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,678
By This is the grave of David Ruffin.
Born in 1941 in the amazingly named Whynot, Mississippi, Ruffin grew up the son of a minister and a lumber truck driver. That’s not surprisingly, most Black ministers had to work regular jobs too unless they had a large and prosperous church, which definitely was not the case in Whynot. Unfortunately for David and his siblings, he also gave them a lot of beatings. Their mom had died shortly after David’s birth and his father remarried. The family formed a traveling gospel group and that got Ruffin his first experience in music.
Initially, Ruffin intended to follow his father into the ministry. In 1955, he was placed under a guardian who lived in Memphis so he could study for the ministry there. But it did not stick at all. Ruffin was far more interested in the Memphis music scene and spent all his time pursuing that. The next year, he went to Hot Springs, Arkansas, singing for the jazz pianist Phineas Newborn. He was quite good and joined The Dixie Nightingales for a bit, and the The Soul Stirrers, again just briefly. By the late 50s, he was fully into secular music, having seen Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, and others make this transition successfully.
As it happened, Ruffin’s guardian was moving to Detroit and he brought the boy along. Singing at the time under the name of Little David Bush, Ruffin made some early recordings that were whatever. But in 1958, he met Berry Gordy, a rising star in the Detroit music scene. Ruffin moved in with Berry Gordy Sr. shortly after and helped him build the house that became Motown’s headquarters. He got to know all the other young musical talent working in Detroit at that time and he became buddies with another kid, by the name of Marvin Gaye.
Ruffin started to get gigs and recorded a bit but really didn’t have much going on. He was a guy in the Detroit scene. Then the Temptations fired Al Bryant. They needed a new lead singer and they hired Ruffin. He soon became a legend. The group had started in 1960 and had some limited success. But hiring Ruffin would change their whole trajectory. Soon, they became among the biggest hitmakers of any genre through the mid-60s. Just think of the huge hits. There’s “My Girl,” recorded shortly after Ruffin joined the group and hit #1 on the charts. Interestingly, the song was written and produced by Smokey Robinson but rather than record it himself, he gave it to the Temptations. In fact, it was Robinson who pushed Ruffin into the group’s lead. When Ruffin first joined, a bunch of the guys split the lead vocals. Robinson saw them and said that they really needed to let Ruffin lead and he had a song he thought would prove the point. That was “My Girl.” From there, Ruffin was the lead.
Other big hits while Ruffin led the group include “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” which hit #13 on the pop charts in 1966 and led the R&B charts for 8 weeks. The Stones covered it on It’s Only Rock and Roll in 1974. He also sang lead on “I Wish It Would Rain,” which hit #4 on the pop charts in 1968. It was the lead on The Temptations Wish It Would Rain,” their last album of the classic Motown era and the last that their buddy Smokey Robinson worked with them on.
In 1968, shortly after the album’s release, things went real bad with the band and Ruffin. For one, he was doing a lot of cocaine, which wasn’t necessarily so common in 1968 as it would be, say, a decade later. And for two, whether he was a piece of shit of a human before the drugs or not, he was a piece of shit human by the late 60s. He was married a couple of times when he started dating the singer Tammi Terrell in 1966. He beat the living hell out of her, like Ike and Tina. He was already doing a lot of drugs by the mid 60s and went into rehab for the first time in 1967. Drugs brought out the violence in Ruffin and he once beat Terrell in the head with his motorcycle helmet. She had headaches the rest of her short life before dying of brain cancer in 1970. I don’t imagine the beating caused the cancer and maybe that was the real origin of the headaches, but either way, he was terrible. He also tried to take over the band. He wanted the rest of the Temptations to play a strictly backing role to him, a la Diana Ross with the rest of the Supremes after she went huge. They were not happy with that. Then he started blowing off performances to be with women and they fired him. He and Berry Gordy then filed lawsuits against each other over various contractual issues. It was a real mess.
Ruffin had an OK solo career at first, with a good hit with “My Whole World Ended” in 1969 that reached the top 10 and another top ten hit in 1975 with “Walk Away from Love.” But by the mid 70s, the drugs had totally taken over. He would pop up here and there when he needed money. That included coming back to the Temptations for a nostalgia tour in 1982. It didn’t last long and they fired him again for the same reason as before–cocaine and its various impacts. In 1985, he and his former bandmate Eddie Kendricks did a collaboration with Hall and Oates that did pretty well. But Hall and Oates, though they were huge Temptations fans, broke with Ruffin too because of the cocaine. He was in and out of the prison system and/or rehab for most of the 80s, including serving four months in prison for tax evasion.
In 1989, the Temptations were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Building on this, Ruffin, Kendricks, and Dennis Edwards, who had initially replaced Ruffin back in 68, did a tour together. They liked it and wanted to keep going. But you won’t be surprised to discover that Ruffin died after overdosing on crack in 1991. He was 50 years old.
In a completely gratuitous change of history, when NBC did a made-for-TV movie about the Temptations, they changed the story of Ruffin’s death so that he was beaten and dumped outside a hospital and that his body was unclaimed in a morgue for a week. So his family used the network and other key players in the film for defamation, but they lost the case.
David Ruffin is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, Detroit, Michigan.
If you would like this series to visit other members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Hank Ballard, inducted in 1990, is in Atlanta and LaVern Baker, inducted in 1991, is in Queens. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.