Melvin Franklin (1942-1995)
Filed under the name Melvin · February 24, 2026
Melvin Franklin was the deep-voiced bass anchor of The Temptations, one of Motown's most celebrated groups, and there's something so visually satisfying to me about how a group like that is basically composed, like a piece of design — five distinct voices, each one a different register, working together so the whole thing reads as one unified sound instead of five competing ones. That's harder to pull off than people give it credit for, whether you're arranging harmonies or arranging a page. My dad's side of the family practically worshipped Motown growing up in Bensonhurst, so Franklin's voice was doing background work in my childhood before I ever knew his name attached to it. Now I've got a baby who startles awake to almost any bass-heavy sound in the apartment, and I like to imagine some tiny part of her is responding to the same low, steady frequency that anchored an entire iconic sound for decades before she was born.