The 1960s File Feature
What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted
What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted: Jimmy Ruffin's Motown MasterpieceDetroit in the Summer of 1966There is a particular quality to the Motown recordings of 19…
01 The Story
What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted: Jimmy Ruffin's Motown Masterpiece
Detroit in the Summer of 1966
There is a particular quality to the Motown recordings of 1966: a warmth in the low end, a brightness in the strings, a precision in the horns that makes even the saddest song feel like it belongs in sunlight. The studios at 2648 West Grand Boulevard in Detroit were producing music with an efficiency and an emotional intelligence that the broader music world would spend the next half-century trying to decode. Into that environment walked Jimmy Ruffin, the older brother of David Ruffin of The Temptations, a singer whose career had spent several years not quite catching fire despite genuine talent and a connection to the label's inner circle.
The Song That Found Its Singer
What Becomes of the Brokenhearted had been written by William Weatherspoon, Paul Riser, and James Dean, and it was initially intended for other artists before landing with Ruffin. The song's emotional register, a kind of dignified suffering, suited his voice in ways that would have been different with another singer. Ruffin's tenor had a quality of sustained yearning, a sound that could carry grief without collapsing into despair. The production, lush with orchestration, placed that voice at the center of an arrangement that swelled and receded in waves, mirroring the emotional logic of the lyric itself.
Rising Through the Charts
The single entered the American market in the summer of 1966 and built momentum steadily. It debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on August 20, 1966, at position 87. Over the following weeks it climbed consistently, reaching its peak of number 7 by October 29, 1966, and spending 17 weeks on the chart in total. That peak position placed it among the upper tier of Motown singles released that year, a year when the label was releasing records with almost reckless frequency and quality. Competing for attention on radio with Motown's own catalog was itself a significant challenge.
Beyond Its Original Moment
The song returned to public attention through multiple revivals across the decades. Dave Stewart and Colin Blunstone recorded a version in the early 1980s that introduced the track to younger British audiences. It appeared in the 1992 film Fried Green Tomatoes, which brought it to American cinema audiences who may have missed it the first time around. Each revival confirmed something about the song's construction: it was built on emotional foundations solid enough to survive translation across different eras, different arrangements, and different cultural contexts. Jimmy Ruffin's original recording still carries the most weight, but the song's resilience speaks to the strength of the underlying writing.
Ruffin's Legacy and the Song's Permanence
Jimmy Ruffin never replicated the commercial peak of this single in the United States, which gives the track a particular poignance in the context of his career. The song is, by most measures, his defining American moment: the record that placed him on the chart at the level his talent deserved and showed what he could do when song and singer were perfectly matched. With 8.4 million YouTube views, the recording has continued to find listeners decades after its original release. Motown at its best produced recordings that sounded equally good on a transistor radio pressed to a teenager's ear and on a full speaker system in a quiet living room; this one passes both tests with ease. The song also benefited from that particular Motown quality of sounding timeless almost from the moment of release, never too rooted in any specific sonic trend of its year to become a period piece. Put it on and follow the orchestration up through the verses; the way the strings lift in the chorus is one of the great moments in Motown production history.
"What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted" — Jimmy Ruffin's singular moment on the 1960s charts.
02 Song Meaning
What What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted Says About Love's Aftermath
Walking Through a World Remade by Loss
The emotional premise of What Becomes of the Brokenhearted is deceptively simple: the narrator has been left by someone he loved, and now he moves through the world carrying that loss like a second skin. What the song does with that premise is more interesting than a simple catalogue of grief. The narrator observes the world around him as if he has become slightly transparent to it, present but no longer fully participating. He sees other people living, laughing, loving, and the contrast sharpens the edges of his own isolation.
The Question That Structures Everything
The song is organized around a question rather than a statement, which is an unusual structural choice for a pop song of its era. The title phrase functions as both the chorus's hook and its philosophical center. The question is not rhetorical in the conventional sense; the narrator seems to genuinely not know the answer. What does become of someone who has been through this? Where do they go? The song does not resolve this, which is part of what makes it ring true. Loss of this kind does not resolve; it changes shape.
Motown's Emotional Register
The song fits within Motown's broader project of making music that could speak to universal emotional experiences across racial and cultural lines. The label had built its commercial success on this kind of universality, producing records that could play on radio stations in Detroit and in Birmingham and in Los Angeles and mean something in each place. What Becomes of the Brokenhearted achieves this through its emotional precision: the particulars are unspecified enough that any listener who has experienced heartbreak can inhabit the narrator's position.
Dignity as an Emotional Choice
What distinguishes Ruffin's performance, and what the song's writing supports, is its refusal of self-pity. The narrator is suffering, but he carries that suffering with a kind of restraint that reads, fifty years later, as deeply dignified. There is no begging, no recrimination, no collapsed wallowing. The grief is presented as a fact of life rather than an aberration, something that happens to people who allow themselves to love, and the narrator's question to the world is how one continues after that fact has settled in.
Why the Song Endures
The longevity of What Becomes of the Brokenhearted comes from the combination of its emotional intelligence and its musical quality. The orchestration is generous without being manipulative; it supports the vocal rather than substituting for genuine feeling. Ruffin's voice does the essential work, and the production gives it the frame it deserves. Listeners who encountered the song in 1966, or through any of its subsequent revivals, found something that named an experience they could not otherwise have articulated this precisely. That service is what great pop music has always performed.
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