Abdul “Duke” Fakir, the last original member of the beloved Motown group The Four Tops, died Monday at his home in Detroit. He was 88 years old.
A family spokesman said Fakir died of heart failure surrounded by family and friends. Announcing his death on Monday afternoon, the family said it was “with heavy hearts that we mourn the loss of a pioneer, icon and music legend who touched so many lives throughout a musical career that spanned seven decades.”
Fakir, who co-founded the Four Tops in 1953, had been battling bladder cancer and retired from touring late last year. A source told Billboard that on Sunday he “seemed happy, talking and mingling, but the minute he turned around to do anything he was gone.”
The Four Tops were one of Motown’s most popular and enduring bands, reaching their peak in the 1960s. Between 1964 and 1967, they released eleven Top 20 hits, including two, I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch) and the operatic classic Reach Out I’ll Be There. Other songs, many of which depicted 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 with the Detroit-based company that Berry Gordy founded in the late 1950s. But Fakir and lead singers Levi Stubbs, Leonard “Obie” Benson and Lawrence Payton had already been together for a decade when Gordy signed them in 1963, and already possessed a polished stage presence and a versatile vocal style that allowed them to sing anything from country songs to pop standards like “Paper Doll.”
They first called themselves the Four Ames, but soon changed their name to the Four Tops to avoid confusion with the white harmony quartet, the Ames Brothers.
The Four Tops recorded for several labels, including Chicago’s famed Chess Records, but had little commercial success, but Gordy and A&R man Mickey Stevenson paired them with the songwriting and production team of Eddie Holland, Lamont Dozier and Brian Holland, who became an instant hit, blending tight, haunting harmonies (with lead tenor Fakir) behind Stubbs’ urgent, sometimes frantic baritone.
After Holland-Dozier-Holland left Motown in 1967, the Four Tops enjoyed sporadic success, scoring hits over the next few years such as “Still Water (Love)” and two Top 10 hits in the early 1970s for ABC/Dunhill Records, “Keeper of the Castle” and “Ain’t No Woman (Like the One I’ve Got)”. Their final Top 20 hit came in the early 1980s with the sentimental ballad “When She Was My Girl”.
All the while, they kept busy performing concerts, even touring with later members of The Temptations, a friendly rivalry that began when the two groups performed together in 1983 for an all-star television concert celebrating Motown’s 25th anniversary. While the Temptations and other groups of their generation were plagued by drug problems, internal strife and member turnover, the Four Tops remained united and intact until Payton’s death in 1997. Benson died in 2005, and Stubbs in 2008.
“What I like most about them is that they’re very professional, they enjoy what they do, they’re very loving and always gentlemen,” Wonder said of the band in 1990 while helping to get them into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Fakir later toured as the Four Tops with lead singer Alexander Morris, Ronnie McNair, and Lawrence Payton’s son, Lawrence “Rokel” Payton Jr.
“As each of them (the original members) left, a piece of me was left with them,” Fakir told UK Music Review in 2021. “When Levi left, I was stumped as to what to do from that moment on, but after a while I realised that the name and legacy they left behind me had to carry on. And judging by the crowd’s reaction, it was immediately clear that I did the right thing, and I feel really happy about that.”
In addition to their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, they were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998 and received a Lifetime Achievement Grammy in 2009. More recently, Fakir has been working on developing a Broadway musical based on their lives and is completing a memoir, “I’ll Be There,” which is scheduled for publication in 2022.
Fakir was married twice, for 50 years to Piper Gibson, and had seven children, six of whom are still living. In the mid-1960s, he was briefly engaged to Mary Wilson of The Supremes.
Fakir, of Ethiopian and Bangladeshi descent, continued to live in Detroit after Gordy moved the label to Los Angeles in the early 1970s, and grew up in a rough neighborhood where rival black and white gangs frequently fought. From an early age, he dreamed of becoming a professional athlete, but he was also a talented singer, gaining attention as a tenor and performer in a church choir. As a teenager, he became friends with Stubbs and first sang with Benson and Payton at a birthday party thrown by a local “girl” group, which Fakir remembers as “a very nice group of upper-class young women.”
“We told Levi to pick a song and sing the lead, and we just did the backing vocals. When he started singing, we all clicked as if we’d been rehearsing for months! We played together so well. As we were singing, we looked at each other and immediately said, ‘Wow, this is a group! This is a group!'”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
