Harvey Fuqua

Singer / songwriter / record producer Harvey Fuqua was born in Louisville, KY, on July 27, 1929. His uncle was Charles Fuqua, a member of The Ink Spots, and Harvey spent much of his childhood singing on street corners with relatives and friends, including Bobby Lester. After a stint in the army, Harvey formed a vocal group with Lester called The Crazy Sounds and they began singing in the nightclub circuit in and around Cleveland, OH. In 1953 rock-and-roll pioneer Alan Freed caught the group's act and signed them to his Champagne Records label, changing their name to The Moonglows. The next year they recorded their first hit, "Sincerely", co-written by Fuqua and Freed for Chess Records and it went to #1 on the R&B charts. Considered a classic of the "doo-wop" vocal style, the song has been covered by a number of artists, including The McGuire Sisters, for whom it was one of their biggest hits. In 1959 Fuqua changed the lineup of The Moonglows, importing several members of a Washington group called The Marquees, including a young singer named Marvin Gaye. After The Moonglows broke up, Fuqua and Gaye moved to Detroit, where Gaye became a background singer and session drummer at Motown Records and Fuqua became a producer and manager, working with Anita Gordy, sister of Motown founder Berry Gordy (he eventually married Gordy's sister Gwendolyn). He also started two record labels, Harvey and Tri-Phi, which signed such artists as The Spinners, Jr. Walker and the All Stars and Shorty Long. He later sold the two labels, along with the talent, to Motown. Fuqua eventually became head of Artist Development at Motown, in which capacity he helped the label's artists craft their stage acts, and found time to write and produce songs for such singers as The Supremes (for whom he wrote "Someday We'll Be Together"), Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell (he produced most of their duets together). He left Motown in 1969 and went to RCA Records, where he stayed for a number of years, producing and managing. In 1982 he contacted his old friend Marvin Gaye, whom he hadn't seen for several years, and that eventually resulted in the production of one of Gaye's biggest hits, "Sexual Healing", from the album "Midnight Love". Fuqua was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as a member of The Mooglows, in 2000. He died of a heart attack in Detroit, MI, in 2010.