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

The funk and soul singer, who has died aged 77, was part of Black family life in the US while being a cult sensation in the UK – and his smooth but never slick music rightly endures

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. 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”.

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