The last original member of Motown group the Four Tops, Abdul “Duke” Fakir, has died of heart failure aged 88.
He died with his wife and other loved ones at his side at his home in Detroit.
The Four Tops were among Motown’s most popular and enduring acts, peaking in the 1960s.
Between 1964 and 1967, they had 11 top 20 hits and two Number one’s: “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)” and the operatic classic “Reach Out I’ll Be There.”
Other songs, often sagas of romantic pain and bereavement, included “Baby I Need Your Loving,” “Standing in the Shadows of Love,” “Bernadette” and “Just Ask the Lonely.”
Many of Motown’s greatest stars, from the Supremes to Stevie Wonder, came of age at the Detroit-based company founded by Berry Gordy in the late 1950s.
But Fakir, lead singer Levi Stubbs, Renaldo “Obie” Benson and Lawrence Payton had been together for a decade when Gordy signed them up in 1963.
They called themselves the Four Aims when they started out, but soon renamed themselves the Four Tops to avoid confusion with the white harmony quartet the Ames Brothers.
Besides the Rock Hall of Fame, their honours included being voted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998 and receiving a Grammy lifetime achievement award in 2009.
More recently, Fakir was working on a planned Broadway musical based on their lives and completed the memoir “I’ll Be There,” published in 2022.
Fakir was married twice, for the last 50 years to Piper Gibson, and had seven children. (Six survive him). In the mid-1960s, he was briefly engaged to Mary Wilson of the Supremes.
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