Tito Jackson, who along with brothers Michael, Jermaine, Jackie and Marlon was a founding member of the iconic family group the Jackson 5, died on Sunday at the age of 70.

News of the death was first reported by Entertainment Tonight, which said that the news of Tito’s passing came from Steve Manning, a longtime friend and business associate of the Jackson family. Manning told ET that he believed Tito suffered a heart attack while on a road trip, adding that the cause of death had not been officially determined. People magazine confirmed the news with Tito’s cousin, SIggy Jackson.

He had recently performed with brothers Marlon and Jackie under the renewed auspices of the Jacksons, including a performance in England just a week ago. An L.A. audience saw the Jacksons perform at the Fool in Love Festival in Hollywood Park on August 31. Tito had also recorded and performed extensively as a blues guitarist over the past 20 years, either under his own banner or with the B.B. King Blues Band.

Tito Jackson, of course, played guitar, sang and danced his way into homes around the world as the Jackson 5 became an international sensation in the late ’60s and early ’70s, with a string of smash hits that included four consecutive No. 1 hits: “I Want You Back” in 1969 and “ABC,” “The Love You Save” and “I’ll Be There” in 1970. “Dancing Machine,” released in 1974, did almost as well, peaking at No. 2. During this first wave of fame, the young Michael was the main focus, but the lesser-known brothers’ chemistry and choreography were an essential part of their success as a top act on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and other television variety series.

After a label switch from Motown to Epic, and a name change from the Jackson 5 to the Jacksons — and the addition of Randy to the fold — the group went on to chart in the Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 with “Enjoy Yourself” in 1976, “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)” in 1979, and finally, in 1984, “State of Shock,” a collaboration with Mick Jagger that was more of a solo project for Michael than a true group effort. The group’s stadium-filling Victory Tour in ’84 gave the brothers one last hurrah as superstars in their own right, after the success of “Thriller” made it clear that Michael’s future was a full-time solo act. Michael left the Jacksons at the end of that tour, taking most of the attention with him, but various permutations of the family group have continued to perform and record on and off since.

Tito was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997, along with the rest of the Jackson 5. Michael, who died in 2009, is the only member of the original five-brother lineup to precede Tito.

Tito knew that, as one of the less prominent members of the family combo, his name was sometimes used as a joke. “I’ve always been the quietest member of the group, so people make fun of me,” he said in a 2018 interview with the Jitney. “One of my favorite basketball players, Charles Barkley, said, ‘If Tito wasn’t in the Jackson 5, would we miss him?’ That just hit me in the heart. It crushed me.”

Initially, Tito’s guitar playing was limited to the Jackson 5’s live shows, as Motown prohibited the brothers from writing or playing instruments on their first string of hits. But Tito began adding his guitar parts to their recordings after the brothers broke with Motown and signed with Epic in the mid-1970s.

Tito was the last sibling from the original lineup to release a solo album—a moment that didn’t come until 2016, when he finally released his first proper record, “Tito Time.” It showcased his interest in the blues, a form Tito returned to and emphasized in the latter part of his life.

“I got married at 18. I wanted to be with my three sons, so I didn’t pursue a solo career at that time,” Tito said, explaining his lack of a discography to the Jitney. “But this record (‘Tito Time’), the first single I did with Big Daddy Kane (‘Get It Baby’), did pretty well. The band from Alabama plays it at halftime at their football games. It was a lot of fun to watch the band and the cheerleaders dance to it.”

In 2021, Tito released and toured another blues-oriented album, “Under Your Spell,” that recording featured guests such as Stevie Wonder, George Benson, Joe Bonamassa, and his brother Marlon.

He told the Boise Beat in an interview at the time that the Jackson 5 had little-publicized blues origins, noting that he “started playing guitar and playing blues music before the brothers were even singing as a group. We had done some harmony singing with our mother when she was doing the dishes and things like that. As far as having a band, the Jackson 5 or the three of us, we hadn’t organized it at that point. My dad and my uncle would come over and I’d jam with them.

“That’s actually how we started with the Jackson 5; before we went to the Motown sound, we played a lot of blues sets. We’d record about five or six blues songs at every show we did. Once we got to Motown, we didn’t do blues anymore because we started playing all those records and our audience wasn’t a blues audience, so we wrote out our blues songs. We didn’t have that many, we covered other artists’ songs. The only other time I could play blues at that point was (if) there was an accident on stage (and) one of the other brothers was playing when the mics went out. He’d yell, ‘Tito, play some blues!’ That almost never happened, but it happened a few times.”

Tito was born on October 15, 1953, in Gary, Indiana, the third child of Joe and Katherine Jackson. He began playing guitar at age 10, and after his father caught him fiddling with one of his guitars one day, Joe bought him one of his own.

Tito encouraged his own three sons to enter the business. Taj, Taryll and TJ, his sons with his wife Delores “Dee Dee” Jackson, formed the group 3T, managed by their father. 3T released a debut album, “Brotherhood”, co-produced with Michael Jackson and released through his label MJJ Music, which was certified gold in several countries, including the United Kingdom. Subsequent 3T albums were released independently in 2004 and 2015.

Tito explained his own quiet return to music in a cover story interview with Blues Blast magazine in 2021.

“I decided to take a little break after the Victory Tour, but the break was so-o- long, I couldn’t do it anymore! I wanted to play some music and I wanted to be back on stage. I had been playing Jackson 5 music practically my whole life, but the blues was the main music in my family. I just wanted to jambut I couldn’t find any professionals who wanted to do that.

“I was living in Oxnard, California at the time. It’s not a big city like L.A., so I started a little blues band with a couple of my friends. Music was their second job… the kind of guys who play drums on the weekends and have day jobs during the week. I couldn’t do much with those guys because I didn’t want to take them away from their jobs and rob them of the benefits they’d built up over 15, 20 years.” He said he played mostly weddings and church benefits for a while before building up enough of a name for himself as a blues musician to get gigs in Japan and France en route to recording his first album 11 years ago.

Tito told the publication that he was torn between R&B and blues, so he first made the album “Tito Time,” which was more of a nod to the Jacksons’ classic styles — including the Big Daddy Kane collaboration. “I said I can always do blues, because blues is a music that really has no age. The older you get, the more acceptable it probably is. But I decided, ‘I’m going to do this Jackson album first.’ … But somewhere in the back of my mind I wanted to do a blues album,” which turned out to be his second and final solo release, “Under Your Spell.” “My love is really in that genre of music.”

Tito Jackson was also a judge on the BBC singing competition Just the Two of Us and executive producer of the reality series The Jacksons: A Family Dynasty, which followed a reunion of the brothers.

Below, watch footage of the Jacksons’ performance at the Fool in Love Festival in LA, just over two weeks before Tito’s death.