NEW YORK, NY.- Frankie Beverly, the lead singer and songwriter of the soul and funk band Maze, whose songs, including “Golden Time of Day,” “Joy and Pain” and “Happy Feelin’s,” provided the soundtrack to countless summer cookouts and family reunions for more than five decades, died on Tuesday. He was 77.
His death was announced in a statement by his family on his Instagram account. The statement did not say where he died or cite a cause.
“He lived his life with pure soul, as one would say, and for us, no one did it better,” the statement said. “He lived for his music, family and friends.”
Beverly had announced a farewell tour this year with a handful of dates. He had said that he would retire after going on the road one last time.
“Thank you so much for the support given to me for over 50 years as I pass on the lead vocalist torch to Tony Lindsay,” Beverly said in a statement to Billboard at the time. “The band will continue on as Maze Honoring Frankie Beverly. It’s been a great ride through the decades. Let the music of my legacy continue.”
With his smooth baritone, Beverly led Maze to success on the R&B charts and Black radio. But the band did not have a lot of crossover pop success.
“Frankie Beverly may be the biggest R&B star you never heard of,” J.D. Considine, the Baltimore Sun music critic, wrote in 1994.
That did not seem to bother him much.
“Yeah, I wish more people did know who I was,” he told Considine, “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.”
It would be difficult to count the number of artists who have cited Beverly’s music as inspiration or sampled from his ever-expanding playbook of infectious melodies and harmonies. Many have covered his work, some with more fanfare than others. His 1978 song “I Need You” was sampled in “Hustler’s Ambition” by 50 Cent, “Talk to Em” by Young Jeezy and “I Need U” by Lil Boosie and Webbie.
And Beverly’s song “Before I Let Go,” though not a big hit, was covered by Beyoncé on her live album “Homecoming” in 2019. In the New York Times podcast “Still Processing,” with Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham, the song was described in 2021 as having “a unique ability to gather and galvanize,” becoming “a unifying Black anthem and an unfailing source of joy.”
Howard Stanley Beverly was born on Dec. 6, 1946, in Philadelphia. His father was a truck driver, and his mother ran the household.
He was influenced as a child by the music he heard in church, by R&B singers like Sam Cooke and Lloyd Price, and by the doo-wop group Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers.
“I was so blown away by Frankie that I changed my own name — my birth name is Howard!” he was quoted as saying in an online biography. “But after I heard Frankie and the guys, I was totally bitten.”
As a 12-year-old, he said, he toured the East Coast for about a year with the Silhouettes (who had a No. 1 hit with “Get a Job” in 1958) after they heard he could sing like Lymon. He then formed a few doo-wop groups of his own and recorded for one of the early record labels of the songwriter and producer Kenneth Gamble — who, with his partner, Leon Huff, would help create the sound known as Philly Soul.
Beverly transformed his group Butlers from a traditional vocal harmony ensemble into Raw Soul, which bore the influence of Sly and the Family Stone’s adventurous fusion of soul, rock and funk.
He and the other members of Raw Soul moved to San Francisco in 1972, but they initially had trouble finding success.
“We were going through hell,” Beverly told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch n 1978. “San Francisco was no Disneyland. It was real, with real hurts and heartaches. We didn’t have any bread and we were out in the street.”
They did manage to get booked at a few small clubs; at one of them, Marvin Gaye’s sister-in-law saw them perform and alerted Gaye to their talent. He took them out on tour in 1976 as an opening act and helped them get a deal with Capitol Records.
“He loved me like a little brother,” Beverly said of Gaye in the online biography, “and certainly working with him helped bring our demos back to life.”
Raw Soul changed its name before its first album, “Maze Featuring Frankie Beverly,” was released in 1977. It was the first of nine albums by the group to be certified gold, including the two-disc “Anthology” (1996).
Information about survivors was not immediately available.
In 2009, when they closed the Essence Music Festival in New Orleans for the 15th straight year, Ben Ratliff of the Times described the experience of listening to Maze:
“The band’s shows are rehearsed rituals, working up to a rare and special audience feeling: deep, sentient serenity, not the usual kind of lose-yourself pop catharsis. It’s done by repetitive funk in slow to medium tempos, without a lot of instrumental flexing; moderation is everywhere.”
As for Beverly, he added: “His voice was half-scorched, and some of the usual traces of Donny Hathaway and Sam Cooke weren’t coming through. But he managed by keeping it in the middle register and by adding small vocal gestures to the rhythm cycles — percussive uh-uhs and dibba-dibbas, gospel grunts.
“His lyrics are about joy and desire, but he works realism, as well as a horror of hurting anyone, into his euphoria.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
