By the time the Spinners were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2023, Henry Fambrough was the only surviving founder member of the American soul and disco group formed 69 years earlier.
Known in Britain as the Detroit Spinners to avoid confusion with a popular folk music quartet from Liverpool, they would go on to record more than 30 hit singles, seven of which reached the US top 10 between 1972 and 1980, and to win 18 platinum and gold albums as well as six Grammy award nominations. Among their most popular songs were Could It Be I’m Falling in Love, Ghetto Child and Working My Way Back to You.
Fambrough, who has died aged 85, was the quintet’s baritone singer. Although his role was mostly confined to singing harmonies, the group also specialised in featuring different lead voices within the same song. He shared the lead vocal on Ghetto Child, and was heard with Dionne Warwick on Just as Long as We Have Love, issued as the B-side of Then Came You, the 1974 release which gave the group, in partnership with Warwick, their only No 1 on the US pop chart.
The Spinners’ story began in 1954 when Fambrough and four friends – Billy Henderson, Pervis Jackson, CP Spencer and James Edwards – from the Herman Gardens public housing project in Ferndale, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, formed a doo-wop group, which they called the Domingoes. Within weeks Edwards had been replaced by Bobby Smith, who became the co-lead vocalist with Spencer, until the latter gave way first to Chico Edwards and then to GC Cameron.
Changing their name to the Spinners in 1961, they made their first recording for the Tri-Phi label, run by Harvey Fuqua, a former member of the Moonglows. A single called That’s What Girls Are Made For reached the Top 30. Two years later Fuqua sold his company and its artists’ contracts to his brother in law, Berry Gordy Jr, whose Motown Records had become a force in pop and soul music.
Motown’s promotional strength helped I’ll Always Love You and It’s a Shame (written by Stevie Wonder) become hits in 1965 and 1970 respectively. During the Spinners’ fallow period between those successes the company occasionally put them to work as chauffeurs, road managers and chaperones for their more successful acts.
In 1972, at Aretha Franklin’s suggestion, they signed with Atlantic Records and began a successful partnership with the producer, arranger and songwriter Thom Bell, who recorded them at the Sigma Sound studio in Philadelphia with a cast of crack session musicians. A new singer, Philippé Wynne, was featured alongside Smith, Wynne’s gospel-style fervour contrasting with Smith’s smoother delivery.
Bell’s sophisticated orchestral arrangements and songs from several talented young writers gave them four hits from their first album in 1973: I’ll Be Around, Could It Be I’m Falling in Love, One of a Kind (Love Affair), and Ghetto Child, on which Fambrough sang the first verse before Wynne took over. Subsequent albums recorded with Bell yielded hits with Mighty Love, I’m Coming Home, Love Don’t Love Nobody, Then Came You, They Just Can’t Stop It (the Games People Play), and The Rubberband Man.
After Wynne had moved on to launch a solo career and the hits with Bell dried up, the group attracted another producer, Michael Zager, who updated their style for the disco era with an arrangement of the Four Seasons’ Working My Way Back to You that reached No 1 in the UK and No 2 in the US in 1979. A similar treatment of Sam Cooke’s Cupid was almost as successful the following year.
Those were their final hits, but they continued recording with other labels before returning briefly to Atlantic, and in 2003 a remix of Are You Ready for Love, a song Bell had produced in 1977 for Elton John, with the Spinners as backing singers, went to No 1 in the UK singles chart.
Of the original quintet of Detroit schoolboys, Spencer died in 2004, Henderson in 2007 and Jackson in 2008. At the time of Smith’s death in 2013 he and Fambrough were the only members left from the group’s successful period in the 1970s. The Spinners’ final album, Round the Block and Back Again, was released in 2021, and two years later Fambrough announced his retirement.
One of his last acts as a Spinner was to visit the Motown Museum, installed in the original Hitsville USA building in Detroit, to which he donated more than 300 examples of the matching costumes the group had worn during their smoothly choreographed appearances on stages around the world and on TV shows such as Soul Train and Top of the Pops.
He is survived by his wife of 52 years, Norma, a daughter, Heather, and a sister, Martha.
• Henry Lee Fambrough, singer, born 10 May 1938; died 7 February 2024
