On all the group’s songs, Mr. Fakir’s high, smooth voice added grace to harmonies that supported the baritone lead vocals of Levi Stubbs.
The Four Tops retained their original lineup until death intervened: From 1997 to 2008, three members died of cancer. Mr. Fakir continued to record, and he was touring until the end of 2023, all the while taking on new singers to fill out the group’s ranks while assuming the roles of both the Tops’ original link and the keeper of their legacy. He officially retired this year.
Abdul Kareem Fakir was born in Detroit on Dec. 26, 1935, to Nazim Ali Fakir, a factory worker who was born in Bangladesh, and Rubyleon Wren, a minister’s daughter from Sparta, Ga., who worked as a domestic and a choir director and played the piano.
At Pershing High School, Duke Fakir excelled at sports; he met Mr. Stubbs at a neighborhood football game. The pair became good friends as well as musical partners, and they were soon joined by two other local singers, Lawrence Payton and Renaldo Benson, who was known as Obie.
The quartet originally went under the name “The Four Aims,” indicating their goal: success. But after being signed to the Chicago-based Chess Records in 1956, the label, a dominant one in rhythm and blues, suggested that they change their name to avoid confusion with the Ames Brothers, a popular singing group.
The Four Tops released a series of unsuccessful singles on Chess, Columbia and Riverside Records before signing with Motown in 1962.
“We were all five to seven years older than most of the Motown artists,” Mr. Fakir told the label’s official website. “But we knew them and watched them grow up. It was like they were welcoming their big brothers home.”
The group grazed the Top 10 with their first single for Motown in 1964, “Baby I Need Your Loving.” The single remained Mr. Fakir’s favorite. “I thought it was the best song on the radio at the time,” he told the British newspaper The Express. “It changed my life completely. It even enabled me to buy my mama a house!”
The next year, the group hit No. 1 for the first time with “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch).” Over the next two years, they became the second most successful male vocal group on the Motown label, after the Temptations. In Britain, they were the label’s top act of that kind.
Other rousing radio hits scored by the group included “Something About You,” “Shake Me, Wake Me (When It’s Over)” and “Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever.”
After Holland-Dozier-Holland left Motown in a dispute over royalties in 1967, the Four Tops’ success dipped, but they still landed some Top 20 hits, including, in 1970, a collaboration with the Supremes on an earlier hit for Ike and Tina Turner, “River Deep, Mountain High.”
The group began to broaden their sound at that time. Their 1970 album, “Still Waters Run Deep,” provided a template for the kind of topical concept album Marvin Gaye perfected on his 1971 classic work, “What’s Going On.”
In 1972, when Motown relocated from Detroit to Los Angeles, the Four Tops elected to stay behind. “I’m a Detroit man,” Mr. Fakir told the city’s Metro Times. “I’m glad I didn’t go.”
Instead the group signed a new deal with ABC/Dunhill, which revitalized their sound. Their debut single for the label, “Keeper of the Castle,” fired by a buoyant bass line and socially relevant lyrics, shot to No. 10. A romantic follow-up, “Ain’t No Woman (Like the One I Got),” pierced the Top 5.
The group proved less successful in the later 1970s, though a deal with Casablanca Records in 1981 yielded the No. 1 R&B hit “When She Was My Girl” (No. 11 on the pop chart). Two years later, the Tops re-signed with Motown, just in time to appear on the classic TV special “Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever,” on which they “battled” their male vocal group rivals the Temptations in a memorable medley.
Their last Top 40 hit, “Indestructible,” came in 1988, on an album of the same name on Arista Records.
In December of that year, the group was booked on the Pan Am flight that terrorists brought down over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people. The Tops had overslept and missed the flight.
In June 1997, Lawrence Payton died of liver cancer after 44 years in the group. The remaining members first toured as a trio, but the next year they hired a former Temptation, Theo Peoples, to fill out their ranks. Obie Benson died of lung cancer in 2005; Levi Stubbs died of cancer in 2008.
In 2009, Mr. Fakir was given a Grammy lifetime achievement award. His memoir, “I’ll Be There — My Life With the Four Tops,” written with Kathleen McGhee-Anderson, was published in 2022.
In early 2023, the Treasury Department filed a complaint seeking more than $500,000 in unpaid taxes from Mr. Fakir and his wife, Piper Fakir. The bulk of the debt is from the years 2001 and 2004, while the rest dates from 2011 and 2019.
He is survived by his wife, of 50 years; his children Farah Fakir Cook, Nazim Bashir Fakir, Abdul Kareem Fakir, Myke Fakir, Anthony Fakir and Malik Robinson; a sister, Elena Braceful; and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Another of his children, Kai Ayne Fakir, died in 2001.
Asked by Metro Times if he had ever tired of singing his decades-old hits, Mr. Fakir said: “It’s a joy to see people jump up and get excited. They want to be part of it, and that’s wonderful. Where else are you going to get that kind of love?”