Smokey Robinson Height and Age: The Facts at 86

Smokey Robinson is 5 ft 11 in (180 cm) tall and 86 years old, born William Robinson Jr on 19 February 1940 in Detroit.

He is one of the few figures from Motown’s first decade still performing.

Height and build

At 5 ft 11 in, Robinson was slightly above average height for his generation of American men and taller than most of his Motown contemporaries.

His figure is better established than most celebrity height claims, for a straightforward reason. He spent forty years photographed in group formations beside performers whose heights are separately documented, which gives the number corroboration that a solo artist’s listing never has.

No reliable weight figure exists, and at 86 any number published would be decades stale.

Age, and the arithmetic people get wrong

He turned 86 in February 2026.

That number surprises people, because they date him from the wrong point. Robinson was not a mid-career star when Motown began. He was 19 when he met Berry Gordy, and the Miracles were already recording before Motown existed as a label.

He was writing hits before most of his eventual labelmates had left school.

The record that built the label

In 1960 the Miracles released Shop Around on the Tamla imprint. It became Motown’s first record to sell a million copies.

Robinson wrote it.

That single detail is the one worth carrying away from any profile of him. Motown’s entire subsequent output, the Supremes, the Temptations, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, was built on a company that a 20-year-old’s song had proven could work commercially.

The song the Library of Congress preserved, and where its hook came from

The Tracks of My Tears was added to the National Recording Registry in 2007, the Library of Congress’s list of recordings judged culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.

The Library’s own essay on it carries detail that almost never appears in coverage of Robinson.

The Miracles released 57 singles. Tracks was neither their biggest seller nor their highest charting, reaching No 2 on the Billboard R&B chart and only No 16 on the pop Top 100. It was released on Tamla, catalogue number T-54118, and recorded in Studio A at Hitsville USA with Robinson producing.

He wrote it in 1965 with two other Miracles, Warren “Pete” Moore and guitarist Marv Tarplin.

And here is the part worth the price of admission. Tarplin built that opening riff, one of the most recognisable in American popular music, after listening to Harry Belafonte’s “Banana Boat Song”, a traditional Jamaican folk tune Belafonte had recorded a decade earlier.

A calypso record from 1956 is sitting inside the guitar figure on the song Rolling Stone named, in March 2021, the greatest Motown record ever made.

The magazine had already placed it 12th in its 1988 critics’ poll of the best records of the previous 25 years, and 50th in its 2004 list of the 500 greatest songs of all time. A single that stopped at No 16 on the pop chart.

The job nobody else had

Robinson became a vice president of Motown while still touring and recording.

Performers of that era did not run labels. They signed to them, usually on terms that left them with very little. Robinson sat on both sides of the table, writing and producing for the Temptations and Mary Wells while fronting his own group.

That is the reason his finances look different from most of his peers’, many of whom ended their careers with catalogue they did not own.

What stands out

The height question brings people here, and it is the least interesting thing about him.

A man who wrote his label’s first million-seller at 20, then spent the next four decades as both its talent and its management, is not really a subject for a body-stats page.

But since you asked: 5 ft 11 in, and 86 years old this February.

For the money, see Smokey Robinson’s net worth.