1987 · Behind the Songs
At 47, Smokey Robinson returned to the Top 10 with a ballad he didn’t write — and finally took home the Grammy that had eluded him for decades.
In 1987, Smokey Robinson was forty-seven years old, a living legend with nothing left to prove — and he proved something anyway. “Just to See Her,” a ballad he didn’t write, carried him back into the Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100, to number one on the Adult Contemporary chart, and finally, at the 30th Grammy Awards in 1988, to the podium: Best Male R&B Vocal Performance, the first Grammy of his storied career. For a man who had written “My Girl,” “The Tracks of My Tears,” and “Cruisin’,” the overdue honor arrived via two lesser-known songwriters, Jimmy George and Lou Pardini, and a four-minute masterclass in tenderness. It is one of the great late-career triumphs in soul music.
Two Writers, One Perfect Ballad
The song began with Jimmy George and Lou Pardini, two names the public barely knew, who created one of the most beautiful R&B ballads of the 1980s. The premise is disarmingly simple: a man who would do anything — cross any distance, pay any price — just to see the woman he loves. No metaphors, no games, just devotion stated plainly. For Robinson, a writer who had spent his life finding poetry in love’s complications, the song must have felt like a gift: it gave him room to do what he does best, which is to sing tenderness itself. Pardini, himself a singer, would later record his own version in 1996 — but nobody sings it like Smokey.
Robinson cut the song for One Heartbeat, his 1987 Motown album, with producers Peter Bunetta and Rick Chudacoff. The production is a model of late-eighties restraint: soft keyboards, a gentle pulse, strings that swell without swamping, and acres of space for that unmistakable tenor. Released March 4, 1987, the single climbed the Hot 100 through the spring and peaked at number eight that July — alongside number two on the R&B chart, number seven on Cash Box, and number one on the Adult Contemporary chart. Even Britain noticed, pushing it to number fifty-two. The B-side, “I’m Gonna Love You Like There’s No Tomorrow,” was a pleasant album cut — but the A-side was the event.
The Grammy That Took Decades
At the 30th Grammy Awards in 1988, “Just to See Her” won Robinson the Grammy for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance — his first Grammy ever, after decades as one of American music’s most decorated songwriters. The absurdity was not lost on anyone: the man who wrote the soundtrack of the sixties had never taken home a gramophone for his own singing until a ballad by two outsiders gave him the vehicle. George and Pardini were nominated for Best R&B Song for their composition — a nomination that recognized the quiet perfection of the writing. It was a beautiful symmetry: the singer finally honored, the writers acknowledged alongside him. Decades late, but right on time.
The win mattered beyond the trophy. In 1987, R&B radio was dominated by synth-driven new jack swing and young stars; a forty-seven-year-old balladeer with a string section was, commercially speaking, a long shot. Robinson’s success proved that sincerity still had a market — that between the drum machines, listeners still hungered for a voice that sounded like it meant every word. One Heartbeat became one of the defining albums of his solo career, and “Just to See Her” its emotional center. It was the sound of experience defeating fashion.
The timing of the comeback carried its own poetry. Robinson had spent the early eighties in a quieter phase, and few would have bet on a lush orchestral ballad conquering the charts in the age of the drum machine. But Smokey had always been a contrarian in the gentlest way — the softest voice in a loud room, the poet among the hitmakers. One Heartbeat reunited him with the mainstream audience that had never really left him, and “Just to See Her” gave that reunion its anthem.
Covers Keep It Alive
Great ballads attract other singers, and “Just to See Her” collected its share. Co-writer Lou Pardini cut his own version in 1996, reclaiming the song he had helped create. Andy Williams — the veteran crooner whose career stretched back to the fifties — recorded it for his 2007 album I Don’t Remember Ever Growing Up, finding in it the same timeless ache. Filipino R&B star Jay R took it on for 2008’s Soul in Love, and smooth-jazz soul man Phil Perry recorded it in 2013. Each version testifies to the song’s durability: a well-built ballad is singer-proof. The song belongs to everyone now — but it will always belong to Smokey first.
What to Listen For
What to listen for: the patience. Robinson never hurries a line — each phrase lands with the deliberation of a man who has waited a long time for this moment. Notice the way his tenor floats over the string arrangement, never fighting it, and the quiet catch in his voice on the title phrase, as if the simple act of seeing her is almost too much to bear. The climax doesn’t explode; it blooms, which is harder and rarer. It is the sound of a master who knows that restraint hits harder than volume.
In the long arc of Smokey Robinson’s career, “Just to See Her” holds a singular place: the hit that finally brought him the Grammy, the ballad that proved his voice could still stop time at forty-seven, the song he didn’t write that somehow sounds like the truest thing he ever sang. It closed the eighties for him the way “Cruisin’” had opened them — with romance, with patience, with that impossible tenor. And it left a lesson for every singer who followed: you don’t need fireworks when you have feeling. Play it for someone you love; that is what it was made for.