The Drifters’ Charlie Thomas passed away last week at 85 from liver cancer, as The New York Times reports.

Thomas, born in Virginia in 1937, became a part of the R&B group’s long legacy in the late 1950s, when Drifters manager George Treadwell fired all the existing Drifters after a disastrous show at the Apollo in Harlem. Thomas, who was singing with a group called the Crowns at the time, was hired as one of the new Drifters.

Thomas was a Drifter for their most commercially dominant era — though he didn’t sing lead, he was with the group when they scored their only Billboard #1 hit, “Save The Last Dance For Me.” He sang on at least two of the Drifters’ bigger hits, including “Sweets For My Sweet” in 1961 and “When My Little Girl Is Smiling” in 1962.

Thomas left the “new” Drifters in 1967, but he’d continue performing with members of the extended Drifters family throughout the next few decades, sometimes as part of a group called the Original Drifters and most often as a group bearing his name, Charlie Thomas’ Drifters.

Alongside members of the original Drifters, Thomas was inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 1988.