Stevie Wonder

A prodigy at Motown

Stevie Wonder was born Stevland Hardaway Judkins in Saginaw, Michigan, on 13 May 1950, six weeks premature, and was blind from retinopathy of prematurity. He signed to Motown's Tamla label in 1961, aged 11, after singing his own song Lonely Boy to Ronnie White of the Miracles, and his surname was legally changed to Morris. The live album Recorded Live: The 12 Year Old Genius reached number one on the Billboard album chart in 1963, and its single Fingertips topped the Hot 100 when he was 13, making him the youngest artist to top that chart.

When his voice changed, Sylvia Moy persuaded Berry Gordy to give him another chance. He dropped the word Little from his name in 1964, and Uptight (Everything's Alright) followed. On 13 May 1971 he turned 21 and let his Motown contract expire. A new deal that July gave him a 14 percent royalty rate. The freedom it brought, including more independence from Berry Gordy, is the hinge of his career.

The classic run

After meeting Robert Margouleff and Malcolm Cecil in May 1971, Wonder began working with ARP and Moog synthesizers. The pair built the synthesizer TONTO and served as associate producers and engineers on four albums, starting with Music of My Mind in March 1972. Talking Book followed in October 1972. It replaced string orchestras with layered synthesizers and clavinet, and it produced two number one singles, You Are the Sunshine of My Life and Superstition. Jeff Beck played on the sessions in exchange for a song, and Wonder's release of Superstition went out ahead of Beck's own version.

Innervisions arrived on 3 August 1973 and won the Grammy for Album of the Year. It holds Living for the City, a story of a young man from Mississippi arrested in New York, and Higher Ground, recorded in a three-hour burst of creativity in May 1973. Three days after the album came out, Wonder was seriously injured in a car crash in North Carolina. He lay in a coma and lost part of his sense of smell.

Fulfillingness' First Finale came out in July 1974 with a more reflective tone. It spent two weeks at number one in the United States, won him a second Album of the Year Grammy, and gave him the Nixon-era protest of You Haven't Done Nothin'. It was the last of the four albums made with Margouleff and Cecil.

Songs in the Key of Life

By March 1975 Wonder was seriously considering quitting music and moving to Ghana to work with children with disabilities. Instead, on 5 August 1975 he signed a new Motown contract for seven albums over seven years with full artistic control. He worked on Songs in the Key of Life from 1974 to 1976. Nathan Watts recalled being called back to the studio at 3 a.m. to cut I Wish, and a stretch of about six weeks at The Hit Factory yielded a single kept basic track. The delay pushed the release from around October 1975 to 28 September 1976.

It debuted at number one in October 1976, the first album by an American artist to enter the Billboard 200 there, and stayed for 13 weeks. I Wish and Sir Duke both reached number one, and Isn't She Lovely celebrated the birth of his daughter Aisha. Elton John said he carries a copy whenever he travels and called it the best album ever made.

After the great albums

His 1979 album Journey Through The Secret Life of Plants was an early digital recording. Hotter than July followed in 1980, and its closing song Happy Birthday supported the campaign for a Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday. In 1982 Ebony and Ivory, with Paul McCartney, reached number one, and I Just Called to Say I Love You won the 1985 Academy Award for Best Original Song.

He has won 25 Grammys, the most by a solo artist, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989. He played the halftime show at Super Bowl XXXIII in 1999, became a UN Messenger of Peace and received the Gershwin Prize in 2009, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014. In August 2024 he performed Higher Ground at the Democratic National Convention. On 28 September 2026, the 50th anniversary of the album, he surprise-released a four-song EP of unreleased Songs in the Key of Life sessions, and a tour playing the album in full is scheduled to run from 13 October in Birmingham to 19 December in Los Angeles.