Stevie Wonder
A musician who, in place of eyes that could not see, rewove the sound of an era with his ears and fingertips.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
The people beside him ⏳🌊
- FamilyLula Mae Hardaway
She raised her son in Detroit and was a co-writer on songs such as 「Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours」.
- MentorClarence Paul
A Motown producer, he took the boy on tour and taught him the stage and the music.
- SupportBerry Gordy
He signed him at eleven, and in the 1971 renegotiation granted him creative autonomy with few precedents.
- ColleagueSyreeta Wright
His lyric partner and first wife, she co-wrote his early songs and made records under his production.
- ColleagueMalcolm Cecil
With Robert Margouleff, he shaped the sound of the peak-era albums of the 1970s on the synthesizer rig TONTO.
- FriendshipMichael Jackson
A friend since Jackson's days as a Motown child star, he wrote songs for him, sang duets with him, and said goodbye in song at the 2009 memorial.
I. The child from Saginaw · 1950–1961
(Birth) He was born Stevland Hardaway Judkins on May 13, 1950, in Saginaw, Michigan. Arriving some six weeks early, he developed retinopathy of prematurity while in an incubator. Too much oxygen inside the incubator is generally cited as the cause. He would never see. (Detroit) Around 1954 his mother, Lula Mae Hardaway, moved the children to Detroit, and he would later take the name Stevland Morris. He is said to have grown up running with the neighborhood kids. (Church) He sang in the choir at Whitestone Baptist Church and learned piano, harmonica, and drums from an early age. How he first came by his instruments differs slightly from one biography to the next: a piano passed down by a neighbor, a harmonica handed over by a relative. Gospel and rhythm and blues on the radio were his first textbooks. Ray Charles, a fellow blind musician, was a model of special importance to him. (Discovery) In 1961, at eleven, he got the chance to sing and play harmonica for Ronnie White of the Miracles. The connection came through White's younger brother, a friend of his. White brought him to Motown, and its president, Berry Gordy, signed him. Because he was a minor, his earnings were held in trust until he came of age, and in the meantime he worked for a fixed allowance. A decade later, this arrangement would become the starting point of the negotiation that changed his musical life.
II. Little Stevie · 1962–1970
(The name) Motown gave him the name Little Stevie Wonder. Memories differ on whether it was Gordy or the producer Clarence Paul who coined it. Paul, who took him under his wing and brought him along on tour, was his first teacher of the stage and of music. He attended the Michigan School for the Blind, balancing schoolwork with recording, and a private tutor traveled with him on the road. (Fingertips) His first two albums, filled with jazz instrumentals and a tribute to Ray Charles, drew little response. The breakthrough was a live recording of a 1962 show at Chicago's Regal Theater. Released as a single in 1963, “Fingertips” Part 2 went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, and the live album “The 12 Year Old Genius” topped the album chart as well. A thirteen-year-old boy held the top of the singles and album charts at the same time. (The breaking voice) Soon his voice began to change, and some inside the company started to worry about his future. In 1965 he climbed back to the top with “Uptight (Everything's Alright),” written with Sylvia Moy and Henry Cosby. This was no child's trick but the song of a young singer. In 1966 he sang Bob Dylan's “Blowin' in the Wind,” reaching toward songs addressed to society. Around the same time, a melody he wrote with Cosby, with lyrics added by Smokey Robinson, became the Miracles' 1970 No. 1 hit “The Tears of a Clown.” (Independence) “Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours” in 1970 was the first hit he produced himself. Among its co-writers were his mother, Lula Mae, and Syreeta Wright, a former Motown employee turned singer. He married Syreeta Wright that year, and though the two parted in 1972, he went on producing her records. Most of the songs on the 1971 album “Where I'm Coming From” were also written by the pair. In the same period he wrote “It's a Shame” for the Spinners and began to earn recognition as a songwriter.
A twelve-year-old's improvised set went to No. 1 exactly as it was recorded, and introduced the name Little Stevie to the world.
- The song's backbone is a give-and-take (call and response): the harmonica tosses out a short phrase, and the audience answers with clapping and shouts. It sounds less like a song than like a game played on a stage.
- What he played was a chromatic harmonica, which can reach the half steps at the press of a button on its side; its short inhaled and exhaled notes leap out like a rhythm instrument.
- When the boy came back to a stage everyone thought he had left and kept playing, the band setting up for the next act scrambled to catch up, and the confusion was captured on tape. You can even hear someone, said to be a musician from the next act, shouting to ask what key he's in.
- Part 1, the single's A-side, is closer to an instrumental, with him pounding the bongos. Heard alongside Part 2, it reveals the arc of the show.
Written with his mother, Lula Mae, and Syreeta Wright, it was the first hit he produced himself, and the prodigy's first step as a producer.
- An electric guitar built to sound like the Indian sitar (the electric sitar) opens the intro with its jangling riff.
- From the first line, which bursts in with a short cry, a rough, hot tone straight from the gospel church takes the lead. It is the voice of a grown singer whose voice has broken.
- Over drums that hit hard on the second·fourth beats (the backbeat) and tambourine, a horn section stabbing in short bursts drives the song relentlessly forward.
- Love's promise is confirmed the way one signs, seals and sends a document, and this conceit repeats in the refrain, traded back and forth with the chorus.
III. The twenty-first birthday · 1971–1973
(Coming of age) In May 1971, when he turned twenty-one, the contract from his minority lost its force. He received the money that had been held in trust and was in no hurry to re-sign with Motown. After negotiations led by his lawyer, Johanan Vigoda, he is said to have won higher royalties and broad freedom over making his records. It was almost without precedent for Gordy's Motown to grant one of its artists that much autonomy. Another part of the backdrop was Marvin Gaye, who that same year moved beyond the company's way of making records with “What's Going On.” (TONTO) In New York he met Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff. The two were running TONTO, a massive rig that linked several synthesizers together. Captivated, he recorded day and night at Electric Lady Studios and elsewhere, playing most of the drums·bass·keyboards himself and stacking them layer upon layer. “Music of My Mind” in 1972 was the first fruit. (Talking Book) “Talking Book” followed the same year. “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” and “Superstition” both went to No. 1. “Superstition” grew out of his exchanges with the guitarist Jeff Beck and had been promised to Beck, but Motown released Wonder's own recording as a single first. That summer he opened for the Rolling Stones on their North American tour, making his name with rock audiences as well. (Innervisions) “Innervisions,” from August 1973, went beyond love songs to take on urban poverty and racism (“Living for the City”), drugs (“Too High”), political satire (“He's Misstra Know-It-All”), and faith and rebirth (“Higher Ground”). The America he had seen and heard on the streets of Detroit and the spiritual world he believed in sat side by side on a single album. He put the freedom he had won straight to work saying what he had to say.
The song in which the freedom won by his new contract and his synthesizer experiments first broke through to a mass audience. It warns against leaning on superstition and anxiety.
- The song opens with drums he played himself. A finely subdivided hi-hat rhythm sets the song's pulse from the very start.
- He overdubbed several layers of clavinet, an electric keyboard whose keys strike strings to make a sharp, snapping sound. The riff hooks into the spaces between the beats rather than landing squarely on them (syncopation), and the body moves of its own accord.
- The low bass line is said to have been played by him on synthesizer. Interlocking with the clavinet, it forms the backbone of the groove.
- Trumpet and saxophone jab in between the riffs, putting an edge on the song.
- His live performance on the children's program “Sesame Street” in 1973 is still talked about as one of his signature appearances.
Through the story of a family who moves from Mississippi to New York, the song depicts urban poverty and racism. It won the 1975 Grammy for Best R&B Song.
- He played and sang nearly every sound himself, from the drums and synthesizer bass to the keyboards and the layered chorus.
- With each verse his voice grows rougher, until in the last verse he spits out his fury in a hoarse, cracking voice. The same man becomes a different voice within the same song.
- In the middle of the album version is a passage like a short radio play, with actors staging a bus stop, street noise and an arrest. It is the moment the song briefly becomes a film.
- The calm, walking rhythm never changes to the end, so the story's tragedy lands all the colder.
IV. After waking · 1973–1977
(The accident) On August 6, 1973, three days after “Innervisions” came out, the car he was riding in collided with a truck carrying logs near Durham, North Carolina. He suffered severe head injuries and lay in a coma for several days. The story goes that when his road manager, Ira Tucker, who kept watch at his side, sang “Higher Ground” into his ear, his fingers began to move in time with the beat. A song of rebirth, recorded just before the accident, came to be remembered as entwined with his recovery. (The Grammys) Once recovered, he won Album of the Year at the 1974 Grammys for “Innervisions.” That same year, “Fulfillingness' First Finale” set a quiet confession of faith, made after his brush with death, beside political satire such as “You Haven't Done Nothin',” and it too won Album of the Year. The following year, when Paul Simon took the same award, he joked in his acceptance speech that he wanted to thank Stevie Wonder for not releasing an album that year, which shows how Wonder stood at the time. (Aretha) He handed songs to his peers as well. In 1973 Aretha Franklin made a hit of his “Until You Come Back to Me (That's What I'm Gonna Do),” and in 1974 Rufus and Chaka Khan made their name with “Tell Me Something Good,” which he wrote for them. (The magnum opus) In 1975 he re-signed with Motown for seven years, a contract reported at the time as the largest in the record industry. After nearly two years of work, in September 1976 he released “Songs in the Key of Life,” two LPs with a bonus EP. “Sir Duke,” dedicated to Duke Ellington, who had died in 1974, and to the jazz greats; “Village Ghetto Land,” a portrait of ghetto life; and “Isn't She Lovely,” a welcome to his newborn daughter, all sat on a single album. It entered the Billboard chart straight at number one, and he won his third Album of the Year. Loss and birth, the street and faith, were all of a piece within him at twenty-six.
Though recorded months before the accident, it is remembered as entwined with his recovery because of the story that he responded to it from his hospital bed.
- He is said to have played every instrument on the track himself and finished it in a short time.
- A clavinet run through a device that opens and closes the sound in a wah-wah (a wah-wah pedal) lays down a squirming riff.
- Repeating in the low register to form the backbone of the groove, a synthesizer bass pulls the body forward throughout the song.
- Its language of a second chance at life and of spiritual ascent sounds like prophecy to anyone who knows of the accident that followed.
A tribute to the jazz greats written in response to Duke Ellington's death in 1974, it reached number one on the Billboard chart in 1977.
- The song's signature is the passage where trumpets and saxophones race through a fast, intricate riff in a single voice (unison).
- Calling out Ellington, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and Glenn Miller one by one in the lyrics, it pays homage to the swing era.
- Nathan Watts's bass moves as if walking, giving the song a jazz spring.
- It is a memorial song, yet its stance is to fill itself with the spirit of celebration instead of grief.
V. A birthday song · 1979–1989
(Plants) In 1979 he released “Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants,” the soundtrack to a documentary film. Unable to see the screen, he made this experimental work while listening to descriptions of the scenes, and it is also counted among the pop albums that used early digital sampling equipment. The response was mixed, but it remains a record of his curiosity about sound. (King) In 1980 “Hotter than July” included “Master Blaster (Jammin'),” dedicated to Bob Marley, along with “Happy Birthday.” It was the song of a campaign to make the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday. He led a rally in Washington in January 1981 and later, with Coretta Scott King and others, is said to have delivered some six million signatures to Congress. The bill passed in 1983, and the first holiday was observed in 1986. (Collaborations) “Ebony and Ivory,” sung with Paul McCartney in 1982, likened racial harmony to the black and white keys of a piano and held the top spot for seven weeks. He played harmonica on Elton John's “I Guess That's Why They Call It the Blues” (1983) and on “I Feel for You” (1984), a Prince song sung by Chaka Khan. In 1985 he joined Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, Tina Turner, Dionne Warwick and others on “We Are the World,” and “That's What Friends Are For,” sung with Dionne Warwick·Elton John·Gladys Knight, raised money for AIDS research. (The Oscar) In 1985 he won the Academy Award for Best Original Song for “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” from the film “The Woman in Red,” and dedicated it to the imprisoned Nelson Mandela; South Africa's state broadcaster then refused to air his music. With Michael Jackson he kept up a friendship that went back to their days as Motown boy stars. He wrote “I Can't Help It” for Jackson's “Off the Wall” (1979), and in 1987 the two sang “Just Good Friends” together on “Bad.” In 1989 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
A song for the campaign to make Dr. King's birthday a national holiday, it became the rallying cry of the rally and petition drive he led.
- A bright synthesizer accompaniment and a machine-straight rhythm create a festive mood.
- The verses win over the holiday's opponents point by point, while the chorus takes the shape of a birthday song anyone can sing along to.
- It was written for a movement, but it is said to have since become the birthday song in many Black households.
- Sung with vast crowds at the 1981 Washington rally, it became both a song and a march.
VI. A name long sung · 1990–2026
(Film) In 1991 he created the soundtrack for Spike Lee's film “Jungle Fever,” and in 1995 he released “Conversation Peace.” The gaps between albums grew longer, but his performing and activism carried on. In 1999 he received the Kennedy Center Honors. (Family) Released in 2005, “A Time to Love” was his first studio album in ten years. Prince played guitar on “So What the Fuss,” and India.Arie sang the title track with him. The following year, 2006, his mother, Lula Mae, died; she had co-written his first hits and stood beside his music all along. After Syreeta Wright he married twice more and had several children. (Farewells) In 2009, at Michael Jackson's memorial service, he sat down at the piano and said goodbye in song. That same year he received the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize and was named a UN Messenger of Peace, speaking for the rights of people with disabilities. In 2014 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and toured performing “Songs in the Key of Life” in full. In 2018 he played harmonica at Aretha Franklin's funeral, sending off a longtime colleague. (Today) At a London concert in July 2019 he announced himself that he would have a kidney transplant, and he underwent the surgery later that year. In 2020 he left Motown, his home since the age of eleven, and released two new singles on his own label. In May 2024 he was granted citizenship of Ghana, a country he had long professed his love for, and that same year he took the stage on a tour themed on unity and democracy. His way of holding the street and faith, love and justice, in a single song had not changed past the age of seventy.
Lesser-known stories
Little Stevie's first album was not an album of songs. The 1962 release “The Jazz Soul of Little Stevie” was a set of jazz-flavored instrumentals on which he played harmonica, keyboards and percussion, and his second album that same year was a tribute to Ray Charles. So great was the success of “Fingertips,” which came next, that this starting point has mostly survived as a mere footnote in his discography. In 1968 Motown released an album of harmonica instrumentals, including “Alfie,” under the name Eivets Rednow. It was Stevie Wonder spelled backward. The record tested him as an instrumentalist rather than a singer, but because it came out under a pseudonym, it drew little attention at the time. The sound of his peak albums of the 1970s bears the deep imprint of Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff. The two ran the synthesizer system TONTO, handling programming and recording, and won the Grammy for Best Engineered Recording for “Innervisions.” Their names appear in the album credits, yet in public memory their work is often folded into Wonder's achievement alone. The inventor Ray Kurzweil recalled that the first individual customer to buy his reading machine for the blind, in 1976, was Stevie Wonder. Their conversations led to the development of a synthesizer that could reproduce the sound of real instruments, and the Kurzweil K250 came out in 1984. He was not only someone who recorded music but a user who helped steer the direction of instrument technology.
Terminology notes 📚🔎
Synthesizer
(Literal meaning) The English synthesize means to combine into a whole. The name itself says that a synthesizer is a machine that creates sound by synthesizing electrical signals. (In pop) A keyboard instrument that uses electrical circuits or computers to shape a sound's pitch·thickness·resonance, producing even sounds that never existed before. In the 1970s Stevie Wonder used TONTO, a rig of several linked units, to create his own bass lines and accompaniments. Just as you mix a few paints to make a new color, it blends and pares a few basic sounds to sculpt new ones. (Elsewhere) In biology and chemistry, synthesis means combining several substances to create a new one.
Clavinet
(In pop) A keyboard instrument in which pressing a key makes a rubber hammer strike a string, with the sound then amplified electrically. Its short, snappy, sticky tone lets it serve as a kind of rhythm instrument in funk. The opening riff of “Superstition” is the most famous example. Think of the short, springy sound of a taut rubber band plucked with a finger.
Chromatic harmonica
(Literal meaning) Chromatic comes from the Greek chroma (color). It means filling in every semitone between the notes of the scale, as if painting them in. (In pop) A harmonica with a button (the slide) on its side; press it and every note rises a semitone, so it can play all the notes of a piano's white and black keys. Most of Stevie Wonder's harmonica playing was done on this instrument. Remember half-covering a hole on a school recorder to get a semitone, and imagine solving that with a single button.
Publishing
(In pop) The business of managing the copyright in a song itself, that is, its melody and lyrics, and collecting money every time it is used. It is accounted for separately from the rights to the sound captured on a recording. Stevie Wonder is said to have won ownership of the publishing rights to his own songs when he re-signed with Motown. Think of an essay in a class anthology: the printed book may belong to the school, but the right to reprint the essay elsewhere belongs to the person who wrote it. (Elsewhere) In general use, it means the publishing of books or magazines.
Syncopation
(Literal meaning) The Greek synkopē means a cutting off, a shortening. It carries the feeling of part of the beat's flow being cut away so that the stress shifts to an unexpected place. (In pop) A rhythmic technique that places accents between the beats rather than on the beats normally stressed; in Korean it is called eotbak ('off-beat'). Most funk and soul grooves come from this off-beat accent. When jumping rope, if you clap between the moments the rope hits the ground rather than on them, the same beat feels far bouncier. (Elsewhere) In medicine, the word is used for fainting, a brief loss of consciousness.
Backbeat
(In pop) A drum rhythm that, in music in four, hits beats two·four hard rather than beats one·three. It is the basic beat of rhythm and blues, rock and roll and soul, and the snare drum takes this spot. When you cheer at a game and clap on two and four of one-two-three-four, the song rolls along with far more energy; that is the power of the backbeat.
Call and response
(Literal meaning) In English, it means a call and a response. (In pop) A give-and-take form in which one person throws out a melody and another singer or the audience answers it. It passed from the Black church tradition of preacher and congregation trading words into soul and gospel. In “Fingertips,” the boy's harmonica and the audience's clapping trade back and forth in just this way. It has the same structure as a gym teacher shouting a chant and the whole class shouting it back.