Opinion | Frankie Beverly brought Black people together like no other musician could

Picture a gathering of happy Black people: laid-back, smiling, content and unconcerned (however briefly) with any of life’s problems. The occasion may be a family member’s graduation from high school or college or a child’s birthday party. Maybe it’s a Mother’s Day cookout in the backyard or just one of those perfect weather days that brings everybody out to the beach or to the park.

No music has ever been better suited for those moments than that recorded by Frankie Beverly, the recently departed leader of the band Maze.

“They were picnic songs,” the writer and Black music expert Kalamu ya Salaam said by phone Thursday. Frankie Beverly and Maze, he said, recorded the kind of music that made you want to “go out and have a good time.”

There were no affectations about them. No pyrotechnics or light shows t their concerts. No costuming. (Beverly would typically top off his all-white casual ensemble with a plain white baseball cap.) There weren’t any particularly poetic lyrics or anything that would interest music snobs who conflate complex music with good music.

“Joy and pain / are like sunshine and rain,” the chorus to the 1980 song “Joy and Pain,” may be the simplest similes ever put in a couplet. But singing it with thousands of others in an arena or at an outdoor festival or even with one’s family while dancing the Electric Slide can provoke a profound happiness.

Beverly, who as the leader of Maze had nine albums certified gold, died at 77 Tuesday after a 50-year music career. The New York Times reports that Maze had nine Top 10 hits on (what’s now called) Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart and two No. 1 albums on the R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart. The NBC affiliate in Philadelphia — where Beverly was born — noted that Maze is perhaps best known for its classic song “Before I Let Go,” which peaked at No. 13 on the Billboard R&B chart in 1981 and has been a staple at cookouts, weddings and parties for families across the country for decades.

Take note: What’s arguably the band’s most popular song was recorded 43 years ago and is still being played wherever Black people happily gather.

What’s arguably the band’s most popular song was recorded 43 years ago and is still being played wherever Black people happily gather.

No less a musical force than Beyoncé covered “Before I Let Go” five years ago. But her rendition, which her fans celebrated with a choreographed TikTok challenge, had, well, the longevity of a TikTok trend. Frankie Beverly’s “Before I Let Go” is forever.

At the risk of grossly oversimplifying things, various genres of Black American music can roughly correlate with certain desires and moods. We may play jazz to help us feel cool, hip and cultured. There’s the blues for when we’re defiantly staring down the troubles that beset us. Funk facilitates our literally getting funky on the dance floor. Gospel can help connect us to the holy and slow jams to one another, and hip-hop can unleash, among other things, our anger or braggadocio.

All the genres mentioned above can make us feel happy. But if you want to guarantee your mood is locked into a happy place? There’s Frankie Beverly and Maze, who signaled the role they intended to play with “Happy Feelin’s,” a single on their 1977 debut album, “Maze Featuring Frankie Beverly.”

Happy feelin’s in the air / touching people everywhere / Plenty love and everything / Listen to the people sing.

As beloved as the bandleader was to Black people, he remained virtually unknown to others. In December 2019, the writer Michael Harriot conducted a poll on Twitter that asked, “Who is the most ‘blackfamous’ person of all time?” The person judged to have been known by the greatest number of Black people and the smallest number of white people was far and away Frankie Beverly.

Twenty-five years before then, Baltimore Sun music critic J.D. Considine began a column about Maze with the line “Frankie Beverly may be the biggest R&B star you never heard of.”

I can picture Black people reading that in the Sun in 1994 certain that Considine’s “you” did not include them. By then, Beverly had been a Black household name for a long time.

Crossing over — that is, being validated by white music consumers — has long been seen as the epitome of success for Black music artists. One gets the sense, though, that Black people loved having an artist who was ours and nobody else’s.

One gets the sense that Black people loved having an artist who was ours and nobody else’s.

“Yeah, I wish more people did know who I was,” Beverly told Consindine for that 1994 piece in the Sun, “but if it’s at the expense of me giving up this thing we have, then I just have to wait until they find out. ’Cause whatever we have, whatever this thing is that we seem to have a part of, it’s a cult kind of thing.”

“Cult” isn’t the word I’d use, in that Beverly’s music brought all types of people together. It’s just that almost all the types of people he brought together — young, old, middle-class, working-class, uneducated, educated, the radicals and the bourgeoisie — were Black.

“I often describe myself as a political and cultural activist,” said the 77-year-old Salaam, one of the surviving members of the Black Arts Movement. “As much as I was involved 30 or 40 years ago in politics — like, we took over the mayor’s office, all that type of stuff — still, Frankie Beverly and Maze? I’ll be there.”

That doesn’t mean, of course, that politics and songs that make political statements aren’t important. They are. What it means is that even in politically upsetting times there are moments that make us happy.

And for 50 years, Frankie Beverly was there to provide the soundtrack for them.