Abdul “Duke” Fakir, the last founding member of the group, has died

Abdul “Duke” Fakir of the Four Tops performs at the All In Music & Arts Festival at the Indiana State Fairgrounds in Indianapolis on Saturday, September 3, 2022. Fakir, the last of the original Four Tops, died of heart failure on Monday, July 22, 2024, at the age of 88.

By Hillel Italy | Associated Press

NEW YORK — Abdul “Duke” Fakir, the last surviving founding member of the popular Motown group The Four Tops, known for hits such as “Reach Out, I’ll Be There” and “Standing in the Shadows of Love,” has died at the age of 88.

Fakir died of heart failure at his home in Detroit on Monday, a family spokesman said. His wife and other relatives were at his side. Motown founder Berry Gordy said in a statement that Fakir helped embody the Tops’ “showmanship, class and artistry.”

“Duke was the first tenor – smooth, articulate and always sharp,” Gordy said. “For 70 years he preserved the Four Tops’ remarkable legacy.”

The Four Tops were one of Motown’s most popular and enduring acts, reaching their peak in the 1960s. Between 1964 and 1967, they had 11 Top 20 hits and two number ones: “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)” and the operatic classic “Reach Out I’ll Be There.” Other songs, often tales of romantic pain and grief, included “Baby I Need Your Loving,” “Standing in the Shadows of Love,” “Bernadette,” and “Just Ask the Lonely.”

Many of Motown’s biggest stars, from the Supremes to Stevie Wonder, came of age at the Detroit-based company Gordy founded 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 in 1963 (after the group had turned him down a few years earlier), and they already had a polished stage show and a versatile singing style that allowed them to play everything from country songs to pop standards like “Paper Doll.”

At the beginning they called themselves “Four Aims”, but soon changed their name to “Four Tops” to avoid confusion with the white harmony quartet “Ames Brothers”.

The Tops had recorded for several labels, including Chicago’s famous Chess Records, with little commercial success. But Gordy and A&R man Mickey Stevenson put them together with the songwriting and producing team of Eddie Holland, Lamont Dozier and Brian Holland, and they quickly hit their stride, blending tight, haunting harmonies with Stubbs’ urgent, sometimes desperate baritone.

After Holland-Dozier-Holland left Motown in 1967, the Tops’ success was sporadic. The next few years saw hits like “Still Water (Love)” and two top 10 songs for ABC/Dunhill Records in the early 1970s: “Keeper of the Castle” and “Ain’t No Woman (Like the One I’ve Got).” They reached the top 20 for the last time in the early 1980s with the sentimental ballad “When She Was My Girl.”

Throughout, they were a busy concert act, touring at times with the later members of the Temptations, a friendly rivalry that began when the groups appeared together on Motown’s 25th anniversary all-star televised concert in 1983. While the Temptations and other peers suffered drug problems, disagreements and personnel changes, the Four Tops remained united and intact until Payton’s death in 1997. (Benson died in 2005 and Stubbs in 2008).

“What I love most about them – they are very professional, they enjoy what they do, they are very loving and they have always been gentlemen,” Wonder said of them when he helped them get inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990.

Fakir later toured as the Four Tops with lead singer Alexander Morris, Ronnie McNeir and Lawrence “Roquel” Payton Jr., the son of Lawrence Payton.

“When each of them (the original members) died, a little piece of me went with them,” Fakir told UK Music Reviews in 2021. “When Levi left us, I was in a dilemma about what to do from that moment on, but after a while I realised that the name just had to live on along with the legacy they left us, and judging by the audience’s reaction, it soon became quite obvious that I had done the right thing, and I feel really good about it.”

In addition to induction into the Rock Hall of Fame, her honors include election to the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998 and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009. More recently, Fakir has been working on a planned Broadway musical based on her life and completing a memoir, “I’ll Be There,” which will be released in 2022.

Fakir was married twice, 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.