Jimmy Ruffin was born in 1936 in Collinsville, Mississippi, to Eli and Ophelia Ruffin, and grew up in a sharecropping family. He and his younger brother David sang gospel together in the Dixie Nightingales. Jimmy reached Motown in 1961 as a session singer and cut singles for the Miracle subsidiary before being drafted into the Army. Back at the label in 1964, he was offered the place of Elbridge Bryant in the Temptations, until the group heard David sing and hired him instead.
Jimmy persuaded the writers of a song meant for the Spinners to let him record it, and What Becomes of the Broken Hearted reached No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1966. Motown’s quality control system then handed his recordings to others, and his version of Beauty Is Only Skin Deep became a hit for David’s Temptations. As his U.S. sales faded, Britain embraced him, and he later moved there for good, recording Hold On to My Love with producer Robin Gibb and lending his voice to the 1984 miners’ strike.
- His shelved Everybody Needs Love became a hit for Gladys Knight and the Pips, and Maria (You Were the Only One) went to Michael Jackson.
- In 1970 he scored three UK Top 10 hits, including Farewell Is a Lonely Sound, and was voted the world’s top singer in a British poll.
- He and David released the duet album I Am My Brother’s Keeper in 1970.
- With Paul Weller he formed the Council Collective for the 1984 benefit single Soul Deep, citing his father’s own past as a miner.
- After David died of a drug overdose in 1991, Jimmy became an anti-drug advocate; he died in November 2014 at 78 with an album left unfinished.
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