The song is a call to action from its opening notes. There’s only a brief stomping riff before Frankie Beverly, the lead singer and songwriter of the soul and funk band Maze, intones “woah-ohhh.” By the time he actually gets to the song’s opening lyrics, “You make me happy,” audiences at barbecues, family reunions, weddings, block parties and musical festivals know they should already be on the dance floor.
“Before I Let Go” peaked at No. 13 on Billboard’s R&B chart after its release in 1981, on the band’s fifth album. But in the more than four decades since, the song became a signature for the group and for Beverly, whose warm but impassioned vocals ignite the track and elevate it to a communal release, particularly at Black gatherings.
Questlove, during a sit-down in March with Beverly for his podcast, called the song “the national anthem of life,” in part for its ubiquity in Black celebrations. Invoking the nostalgia of home and togetherness through its ebullience and Beverly’s bellowing delivery, the song is often an end-of-the-night anthem: Beverly and Maze used it as a set-ender and the band for many years closed the annual Essence Festival with the jam.
Clint Smith, the New York Times best-selling author, poet and journalist, described the energy Mr. Beverly is able to alchemize with his music in a poem from 2015 titled “When Maze and Frankie Beverly Come On in my House.”
“A reminder of the playful manifestations of love, how the harmony of guitar & trumpet & bass & sweat & Frankie’s voice can create the sort of levity that ensures love lasts long after the song has stopped,” Mr. Smith wrote.
Beyoncé’s cover of “Before I Let Go,” from her 2019 live album “Homecoming,” brought the song to new listeners, and her performance — adding calls to new dance moves for TikTok and Instagram audiences — reveled in its sheer delight.
But the song’s legacy perhaps belies its message. Mr. Beverly, a self-proclaimed flower child, who imbued his music with a sunny optimism, wrote it as a breakup song, a farewell to a partner recalled fondly (“Now we’ve had our good times/That’s not the same”).
Born Howard Stanley Beverly and raised in North Philadelphia, Beverly was so heavily influenced by the doo-wop of the 1950s and ’60s, he started to go by Frankie, after the singer Frankie Lymon. But his work with Maze was not sugary or pleading. It was sweaty, funky, soulful. Here are five more examples of Beverly’s smooth singalongs.
1. ‘Joy and Pain’ (1980)
The title track from Maze’s fourth studio album could have landed as cliché. Under Beverly’s lead, the chorus (“Joy and pain are like sunshine and rain”) rings out like a mantra or a chant over the song’s seven-plus minutes, imploring listeners to love and live through it all.
2. ‘Happy Feelin’s’ (1977)
Among the band’s first singles, the slowed-down groove seems engineered to make the body sway. Beverly penned the tune, which opens with a chorus of “doo-do-doo-doo’s,” about innate gratitude — and its message makes the sunny seven-minute track a jammable highlight of the band’s live shows.
3. ‘Back in Stride’ (1985)
This lilting mid-tempo song leans heavily on ’80s synths, but gets a heavy dose of church-inflected soul from spirited tambourine playing and a highly harmonized hook. Among the band’s most commercially successful releases, it reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Soul Singles chart and No. 88 on the Hot 100.
4. ‘Golden Time of Day’ (1978)
Beverly’s voice is in all of its grandeur in this ode to the golden hour peace. “People let me tell you, there’s a time in your life when you find who you are, that’s the golden time of day,” he sings in the second verse.
5. ‘Silky Soul’ (1989)
Marvin Gaye was an early champion of the group and of Beverly, taking the band on tour with him, renaming the group and helping to orchestrate their signing, in 1976, to Capitol Records. Four years after Gaye’s death, Beverly paid homage to “the voice with a velvet touch” on this track, which samples Gaye’s “What’s Going On.”
Read More: ‘Before I Let Go’ and 5 More Essential Frankie Beverly and Maze Songs
