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Smokey Robinson
He’s America’s greatest living poet you know.
By Andrew Male.
Here’s to you: Mr Smokey Robinson, creator of miracles.
BOB DYLAN did not call Smokey Robinson “America’s greatest living poet”. Nope. Al Abrams, Motown’s top PR man, did that. As he explained in his 2011 memoir, Hype & Soul, “I [asked] Al Aronowitz, Dylan’s biographer, if he’d get a quote from Dylan saying, ‘Smokey Robinson is America’s greatest living poet’. Al said, ‘Why bother? That sounds like something he’d say. If Bob sees it in print he’s never going to deny it.’”