Maze’s Frankie Beverly united Black America with his everyman brilliance | Alexis Petridis

The online tributes to Frankie Beverly in the wake of his death on Wednesday offered a fascinating study in contrasts. Black Americans wrote about his band Maze as a fact of life, invoking memories of family parties, summer barbecues and picnics to which they had inevitably provided the soundtrack: “Any time I heard Golden Time of Day or Happy Feelings, I knew it was a good time to be had in my neighbourhood”, as actor and director Tyler Perry put it. Indeed, over time, Maze’s music seemed to take on a symbolic quality: they were the band film-makers reached for if they wanted musical shorthand for Black family life on their soundtrack; when Beyoncé wanted to put a distinctly African American stamp on the Coachella festival, it was Beverley’s music she turned to, covering the 1981 single Before I Let Go.

To British soul fans, Beverly was something else entirely: a connoisseur’s choice. The flop singles he released with the Butlers in the 60s were highly prized by northern soul DJs and collectors. And, in the 80s, Maze became the ultimate if-you-know-you-know band among denizens of the underground soul scene. Championed by taste-making DJs Robbie Vincent and Greg Edwards, they never had a huge hit, but could pack out huge venues. In 1982, before any of their records had even made the charts, they sold out the Hammersmith Odeon. Three years later, as their biggest single, Too Many Games, stalled just inside the Top 40 – its sales boosted by its instrumental B-side Twilight, a massive floor-filler on the soul scene – they sold out six consecutive nights at the same venue.

By the time Maze’s eponymous debut album went gold in the US, Beverly had been a working musician for the best part of 20 years. He started out in doo-wop band the Blenders in his native Philadelphia, modelling himself on Frankie Lymon. His next band, the Butlers, still bore the distinct influence of doo-wop on their 1963 debut single When I Grow Older, but their sound shifted dramatically with the times. Its follow-up, She Tried to Kiss Me (All I Could Do Was Run), was clearly the work of people who’d paid close attention to Martha and the Vandellas’ Heatwave.

By the time of 1966’s Because of My Heart, they’d developed a brassy, hard-driving style that – coupled with the single’s local-label obscurity – later proved catnip to northern soul DJs. The Butlers weren’t without their high-profile local fans in 60s Philadelphia: Thom Bell arranged the strings on 1967’s If That’s What You Wanted, another northern monster, while Kenny Gamble released 1969’s She’s Gone on his own label, its lushness pointing the way towards the sound that would define Philadelphia soul in the coming decade.

But Beverly’s next project, Raw Soul, didn’t fit with Gamble and Bell’s vision for the Philadelphia International label. The clue was in the name. Raw Soul cleaved to a tough, James Brown-influenced strain of funk, completely at odds with the orchestrated sumptuousness of Philly International: even at their sweetest, as on 1972’s While I’m Alone, there was a noticeable grit about their sound. Once again, it would take record collectors and DJs – this time from the deep funk world – to rediscover records that had made little impact on release.

Indeed, Beverly was so out of step with the prevalent style of his home town that he relocated entirely, moving to the west coast. Raw Soul’s recording career dried up, but they kept gigging – on YouTube, you can find black and white footage of a 1975 show at San Francisco’s Winterland that suggests a band in the process of smoothing out their sound a little. Crucially, they encountered Marvin Gaye, who took them on tour as a support act and convinced Beverly to change their name to Maze.

They signed with a major label, and released their debut album. It reworked some old Raw Soul material – While I’m Alone made a re-appearance, becoming a hit single in the process. Indeed, the striking thing about its US success was that it happened despite the fact that Beverly was still weirdly out of step with prevalent trends. It was the height of the disco era, but Maze eschewed its sound entirely: no four-four beats, no dramatic orchestration. Some of their debut album’s tracks were still audibly rooted in funk, but it also minted what would become the band’s characteristic style: mid-tempo, comfortable, relaxed, smooth but not slick, with Beverly’s voice bringing an edge.

Perhaps Maze succeeded because they provided an alternative for audiences not enamoured either of disco or the wild, drugged-out P-Funk sound that was filling arenas at the time. Or perhaps it was down to something the Black critic Nelson George identified in a brilliantly insightful contemporary review of 1981’s Live in New Orleans – the album that really broke them to soul fans in the UK, offering a perfect sampling of their early highlights, Happy Feelings, Joy and Pain and Before I Let Go among them (the only thing missing was 1978’s utterly lovely Golden Time of Day). Maze, George suggested, were “champions of Black stay-at-homes nationwide”; Beverly’s voice had “a rougher, more working-class quality” than your average soul loverman; his songs dealt in “unending fidelity” rather than sex, sounding like “a dedicated husband still madly in love with his wife after all these years”. His protest material was nonspecific and inspirational in tone, and George used adjectives like “wholesome”, “soothing” and “engaging” to describe their sound.

You might also add “reliable” to that list. Over a decade when soul and R&B underwent a succession of striking sonic upheavals, Beverly and Maze opted to gently augment their signature sound rather than hop on the latest bandwagon. There were a few more synthesisers and drum machines on 1989’s Silky Soul, but it was still very recognisably Maze, and, like virtually all their albums before it, it went gold.

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In Britain, that reliability meant Maze remained a constant on a soul scene that spent a significant portion of the 80s being rocked by new and often divisive genres: something everyone could agree on, even if they couldn’t agree about electro, hip-hop or house music. And in a weird way, the fact that they never had a crossover pop hit on either side of the Atlantic may well have bolstered their appeal: they belonged to a Black audience and, in the UK, diehard soul fans alone. Those fans followed them for decades after Beverly stopped producing new material – Maze’s last album was released in 1993, but a version of the band was still touring last year, its audience members still dressing all in white in imitation of Beverly’s trademark stage outfit. That’s the kind of devotion you get when you’re a band that deals in quality, rather than trendsetting.