“Reach Out I’ll Be There” (Holland-Dozier-Holland) – The Four Tops; Motown label. # 1 Billboard Hot 100, # 1 Billboard R&B – 1966. Inducted in 2016.
The Four Tops’ biggest hit of 1966 was written and produced by Motown’s top production team of Holland-Dozier-Holland. According to the Tops’ Duke Fakir, H-D-H realized that when lead singer Levi Stubbs hit the top of his vocal range, it sounded like someone hurting, and they liked him to sing up there so that you could hear the tears in his voice. 
As a result, Stubbs delivered many of the lines in a tone that straddled the line between singing and shouting. Musically, the song features a dramatic, semi-operatic tension along with a rock-solid groove compliments of the Funk Brothers.
“Reach Out I’ll Be There” is one of the most-well-known Motown songs of the 1960s and is today considered to be the Four Tops’ signature song. It was # 1 on the Hot 100 for two weeks in October until it was replaced by “96 Tears” by ? and The Mysterians. It also reached # 1 on the British charts in 1966 where it stayed for three weeks. At the time, it was only the second Motown song to reach # 1 in Great Britain.
