Two African Americans who represented the dreams of their community made their transition this week, and I’m taking a moment to celebrate how they embody the apex, diversity, and massive creativity of blackness.
RIP to Arkabutla, Mississippi, native James Earl Jones aka The Voice who has the distinction of being the rare person capable of being everything his community needed and wanted him to be simply because he understood that all black people want from you is to be good at your job, give a hundred percent every time, and produce work that shows the complexity of being black—one more layer (often buried) of the complexity of being human. I won’t waste y’all’s time itemizing the amazingly list of television, film, and stage credits of Jones that y’all already know and can easily google if you don’t know. Instead, I simply want to highlight how Jones was talented and conscious enough to kill two stereotypical birds with one stone. Just as Prince, Stevie Wonder, and Marvin Gaye constantly evolved and never made the same album, Jones was meticulous in how he chose roles that would challenge and expand his skills while also challenging and expanding the one-dimensional limitations often projected onto black actors since black people are still viewed as a monolith. Yet, just as Prince underscored that humans are pie charts with multiple slices, Jones has left a mosaic of roles that teach us how to be better humans presenting the value of all souls. Whether he was portraying a bombardier, medical doctor, boxing champion, US President, sanitation worker, house painter and poet, baseball player, journalist, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., mentally challenged homeless man, sci-fi villain, college professor, judge, community elder, African king, scary neighbor, and even the leader of a pride, Jones’ ultimate gift was his ability to show that protagonists and antagonists are often labeled as such through their circumstances as much as through their actions and that what makes anyone heroic is not wins but the effort to be better today than one was yesterday.
Now, allow me to make one thing perfectly clear. I am not talking about Jones choosing roles that present “positive” characters to appease and make white folks comfortable. I am talking about the feeling I got as a pre-teen watching Jones play a working class man who is so confident that he can pull a fine-ass woman like Diahann Carroll from the back of a garbage truck.
In Clarksdale, Mississippi, we call that a hoochie coochie man aka a mane, as signified by Muddy Waters, cause blues people know that it ain’t the clothes or the job that make the mane, but it’s the mane who loves himself enough to bring essence and value to anything he does or touches. As an eleven or twelve-year-old, I already knew that mane on the back of that garbage truck because my HBCU-educated parents remained surrounded by those salt-of-the-earth black folks who poured life into their child, expanding and deepening what I understood about being a constructive person. I knew black folks who were too poor to afford grass; yet, they woke every morning and swept their dirt until it looked like marble. This is the type of dignity that Jones reflects on the screen, even from the back of a garbage truck. So, when showing how the US government used welfare to destroy rather than heal and build black families, Jones and Carroll are showing the type of dignity that sustained the black community for hundreds of years until reality television and popular music driven by the toxic trinity of gang, dope boy, and strip club cultures made dysfunctionality the norm of what it means to be black.
Purely for sentimental reasons, my favorite Jones work is The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings for two reasons. One, I am not just a former mediocre baseball player who earned a college baseball scholarship, but my grandfather, Robert McInnis, participated in Negro League barnstorming. To be clear, he didn’t play in the Negro Leagues, but when Negro League teams would barnstorm across the South, my grandfather was one of the players who would represent the local team against the Negro League players. Thus, that film doesn’t just celebrate sports but shows how for black folks even sports was a tool to be used in their sociopolitical and economic civil rights struggles in which black folks were forced to embrace multiple roles to move themselves into full citizenship. Two, participating in an ensemble cast, which includes Billy Dee Williams, Richard Pryor, and others, Jones readily accepted roles in works that unflinchingly address the debate over black authenticity, integration versus Black Nationalism, what it means to be a constructive black person, and what is the line of demarcation between self-hate and playing a role to navigate and circumvent white supremacy. All of this is shown in The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings with Jones being the rock of dignity yet also being a well-crafted enough actor to leave room for others to show that even dignity manifests in a multitude of ways. This is the epitome of Jones’ career in which black folks got to see every aspect of themselves illuminated for the world to know their contributions to global civilization.
Additionally, RIP to Frankie Beverly of Frankie Beverly and Maze aka The Vibe of a people. With so many great testimonies having already been given, I will provide only four points to summarize the legacy of Beverly and Maze.
One, Beverly’s voice represents the encyclopedia of black vocalization, starting with doo-wop, transitioning through Motown and Philly soul, with songs, such as “If That’s What You Wanted,” with his first band The Butlers, and settling into a smoother Stax sound in which Beverly merged the grit and passion of the church with the coordination or sophistication of jazz to give himself and Maze their unique sound that never stopped resonating with black people. Maze was initially too gritty for the Motown and Philly sound, which is what forced them to relocate to San Francisco. The results were soulful grooves dripping with sunshine sensibilities.
Two, because Maze created so many soothing sing-alongs, they don’t get the credit for or are not celebrated for their superior musicianship like Parliament/Funkadelic, Earth, Wind, & Fire, War, Sly and the Family Stone, and others. But, groove for groove, Maze has been sampled as much as most 70s bands because their compositions are anchored in “the one” while also providing serene grooves that create a tranquil atmosphere of familyhood and romance. In short, Maze was your favorite band’s favorite band and must be remembered as such.
Three, well into the age of hip hop, Maze was one of the few groups that carried the bloodstained banner of live musicianship through the 80s and into the 90s so that people’s ears could never forget the beauty and power of live musicianship and spontaneous crowd interaction. It seems like I saw Beverly and Maze every year from the age of 15 through 27. Seeing them live was the combination of a family reunion and a church revival that gave the attendees an aesthetic, cultural, and spiritual experience that enabled them to return to their lives with the knowledge and inspiration to overcome the hell of an unequal life. In a time in which technology has almost overshadowed musicianship, Maze’s primary legacy is their live performance. It’s not just that they have nine Gold albums but that two of those albums—Live in New Orleans and Live in Los Angeles—are staples, not only of their catalog, of popular live music. While “Southern Girl” and “Back in Stride” are my favorite Beverly and Maze songs, I often turn to the live versions when I want to hear them because the mark of a great band is to sound better than the record, and they do!
Finally, Beverly and Maze’s legendary career is proof that black artists can become major stars and make major money all in the black community. They are proof that, if you provide creative music with constructive lyrics that give love to the black community, the black community will love and support you forever. At some point, black folks must learn that being loved by their own is more than enough. Nothing illustrates this more than the career of Beverly and Maze, which was nurtured, sustained, and amplified by black people. Of course, this is a two-way street in which black folks must remember that we can have “nice things” if we support them financially. White flight has never destroyed a city. What destroys a city is when the black middle class abandons a city, following white flight because black people don’t understand and love themselves enough to know that they can sustain what they need and want. “According to the Selig Center for Economic Growth, Black buying power was $1.6 trillion in 2020. That’s higher than the gross domestic product of Mexico. It’s projected to grow to $1.8 trillion by 2024; that growth is outpacing White buying power” (Abioye).
The career of Beverly and Maze is a great example of a constructive circular relationship between business and community in which both parties got what they needed to grow into their best selves. Thus, it’s not just about black artists valuing black audiences; it’s also about black audiences supporting work that nurtures rather than that destroys them as has become the case, which is illustrated wonderfully by Childish Gambino in his video for the song, “Little Foot Big Foot.”
With the passing of Frankie Beverly and James Earl Jones, the black community has lost two beings who reflected the best of who we are. RIP to The Voice and The Vibe—may their careers be a reminder that separating art and ritual only produces spectacle, which tends to breed the worst in humanity.
Click here to watch me discuss the legacy of Beverly and Maze on media veteran and Prince scholar Tony Pendleton’s program, Reality Check, on WURD in Philadelphia, PA, which is Beverly’s hometown. When you get to the page, go to the 2:39:42 mark to hear our discussion, which aired on September 11th.