The story of Stevie Wonder

A boy from Saginaw

Stevie Wonder was born Stevland Hardaway Judkins on the thirteenth of May 1950 in Saginaw, Michigan. He arrived about six weeks early, and the premature birth, together with the oxygen rich air of his hospital incubator, led to a condition called retinopathy of prematurity. It stopped his eyes developing properly and left him blind. He was the third of five children born to Lula Mae Hardaway, a sharecropper's daughter from Alabama, and the second of her two children with Calvin Judkins. When Stevie was four, his mother left Judkins and moved with her children to Detroit. It was a hard start, but the city she chose would turn out to be exactly the right one.[1] [2] [3]

In Detroit the boy joined the choir at Whitestone Baptist Church and was singing solos by the age of eight. He was also teaching himself instruments. Talking to NPR years later, he said he picked up drums at around three, harmonica at six and piano by ten. He and a friend formed a little duo called Stevie and John, busking on street corners and playing the odd party or dance. He went to Fitzgerald Elementary School, and later, once his records started coming out, he studied at the Michigan School for the Blind in Lansing. Sound fascinated him from the start. He listened to the radio constantly and soaked up every noise around him.[1] [2]

In 1961, at the age of eleven, Stevie sang a song he had written himself, called Lonely Boy, for Ronnie White of the Miracles. White's own account was that he had heard the boy playing with a cousin of his. Either way, White took Stevie and his mother to an audition at Motown, and the label's founder Berry Gordy signed him to the Tamla imprint. Around the same time his surname was legally changed to Morris, which his mother's authorised biography describes as an old family name. The producer Clarence Paul gave him a new stage name, Little Stevie Wonder, and it stuck for good.[1] [2] [3]

Because he was so young, Motown gave him an unusual deal. It was a rolling five year contract, and his royalties were held in trust until he turned twenty one. Until then, he and his mother received a weekly allowance, and the boy's own share was two dollars and fifty cents a week. A private tutor travelled with him when he toured. That trust arrangement would matter enormously later on, because turning twenty one gave him the power to walk away. For now, though, he was a child in a building full of adults, and Clarence Paul became his mentor, producer and guide through the Motown machine.[1] [2]

Little Stevie and the Motown years

Clarence Paul spent about a year recording Stevie on two albums. Tribute to Uncle Ray, mostly Ray Charles covers, was made first, when Stevie was still eleven, as Motown tried to link him with the other famous blind Black musician of the day. The Jazz Soul of Little Stevie followed, a mostly instrumental record. Both came out in late 1962, in reverse order, and neither sold much. His first single, I Call It Pretty Music, But the Old People Call It the Blues, reached number one hundred and one in the summer of 1962 and went no further. At the end of that year he joined the Motortown Revue, the label's package tour around the theatres of the Chitlin' Circuit.[1] [2] [3]

At the Regal Theater in Chicago, Motown recorded his twenty minute set, and out of it came Fingertips. It was really a jazz instrumental written by Clarence Paul and Henry Cosby, a showcase for Stevie's bongos and harmonica. On the night, he started to leave the stage, then bounded back for an unplanned encore. The band had already begun changing over for the next act, Mary Wells, and the new bass player, Joe Swift, can be heard on the record shouting out to ask what key they were in. Released in May 1963, the live Fingertips went to number one on both the pop and R&B charts. Stevie was thirteen, the youngest artist ever to top the Hot 100.[1] [2] [3]

Then things got harder. His next records flopped, he appeared as himself in two beach films in 1964, Muscle Beach Party and Bikini Beach, and those did not help either. Worst of all, his voice was breaking. Berry Gordy later wrote that he was ready to drop him. The songwriter Sylvia Moy, the first woman to write and produce at Motown, asked for a chance to write him a hit. Stevie played her a fragment he had been working on, and with Henry Cosby she built it into Uptight, Everything's Alright. He dropped the Little from his name, and in early 1966 Uptight reached number three on the pop chart and number one on the R&B chart for five weeks.[1] [2] [3] [4]

From there the hits kept coming. He took Bob Dylan's Blowin' in the Wind into the top ten, singing it with Clarence Paul, and co-wrote I Was Made to Love Her and My Cherie Amour with Moy and Cosby. His mother Lula co-wrote several of his songs too. He also started writing for others. At a Motown Christmas party in 1966 he handed Smokey Robinson an instrumental track he could not find words for, and Robinson turned it into The Tears of a Clown, a number one hit for the Miracles in 1970. Stevie's own For Once in My Life was recorded in 1967, but Gordy disliked it and shelved it. When it finally came out in October 1968, it reached number two.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

By the late sixties he was restless and curious. In 1968 he released an album of harmonica instrumentals under the name Eivets Rednow, which is Stevie Wonder spelled backwards, and left his real name off the cover. In 1969 he sang at the Sanremo festival in Italy with Gabriella Ferri. That summer he played the Harlem Cultural Festival, a set that includes a drum solo and was rediscovered decades later in the film Summer of Soul. And in 1970 came Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours, written with his mother, Lee Garrett and a young Motown singer named Syreeta Wright. It was the first single he produced himself, and it spent six weeks at number one on the R&B chart.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Twenty one and free

Syreeta Wright had come to Motown as a receptionist and secretary before becoming a backing singer. She met Stevie in 1968, they began dating the following year, and on the fourteenth of September 1970 they married in Detroit. She was twenty four and he was twenty. Together they wrote his next album, Where I'm Coming From, and he wanted the songs to deal with the problems of the world. It came out in April 1971, around the same time as Marvin Gaye's What's Going On. Rolling Stone praised Gaye's record and dismissed Stevie's as cluttered and pretentious. It was his last album under the old contract, and one track has been read as a coded farewell to Gordy's control.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the thirteenth of May 1971, Stevie turned twenty one and let his Motown contract lapse. Around then he heard Zero Time, an album by an electronic duo called Tonto's Expanding Head Band, made up of the English jazz bassist Malcolm Cecil and the American producer Robert Margouleff. Their instrument, TONTO, was a room sized wall of linked synthesizers. Stevie met them in New York that May and hired them as associate producers. The three recorded a huge amount of music very quickly, and Stevie used those tapes as leverage. The new Motown contract, signed in July 1971, was unusually generous, with a royalty rate of fourteen percent and real creative control.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The first result was Music of My Mind, released in March 1972. Stevie produced it and played almost everything on it himself, with Cecil and Margouleff programming the synthesizers. It reached number twenty one on the pop chart, and critics heard an artist coming of age. That summer he opened for the Rolling Stones on their 1972 American tour, which put him in front of huge white rock audiences for the first time. At home, the marriage had not lasted. Stevie and Syreeta divorced in 1972, after about eighteen months, but they stayed close. He produced her first two solo albums, and she kept singing on his records for another two decades.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Talking Book came out in October 1972. The associate producers had struggled to get Stevie to choose songs, and Malcolm Cecil joked that it was an album, not a talking book. The title stuck. Early copies carried the title, his name and a short personal message embossed in braille. The lead single was built around a drumbeat the guitarist Jeff Beck had been playing between takes. Stevie improvised a clavinet riff over it, and Superstition was born. It was meant to go to Beck, but Motown wanted it as the lead single, and it went to number one in January 1973. You Are the Sunshine of My Life followed it to the top.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Innervisions and the crash

Innervisions was released on the third of August 1973. Stevie wrote, produced and arranged nearly all of it and played every instrument on several tracks. Its centrepiece was Living for the City, the story of a young man from Mississippi who moves to New York and is framed, jailed and left with nothing. It was one of the first soul hits to weave in street sounds, voices and sirens. Higher Ground, written and recorded in a three hour burst in May, reached number four. Too High was a warning about drugs, and some heard He's Misstra Know It All as an attack on President Nixon. Rolling Stone later ranked Innervisions among the greatest albums ever made.[1] [2] [3]

Three days after the album came out, on the sixth of August 1973, Stevie was asleep in the passenger seat of a rented Mercury on Interstate 85 in North Carolina, near Salisbury. His cousin John Harris was driving, heading to a benefit concert for a Black radio station in Durham. The car hit the back of a flatbed farm truck. Stevie suffered a fractured skull and a bruise to the brain, and he fell into a coma. The truck driver, a young farm worker named Charlie Shepherd, was badly hurt too, with two broken ankles. Stevie was moved that evening to the intensive care unit of a hospital in Winston-Salem.[1] [2] [3]

His friend and road manager Ira Tucker could not get through to him at first. Knowing Stevie loved loud music, Tucker leaned close and sang Higher Ground into his ear. The next day he tried again, and Stevie's fingers began tapping along on Tucker's arm. When he woke, he had lost his sense of smell and, for a time, his sense of taste. He was frightened he had lost his music too. When Tucker brought a clavinet to the hospital, Stevie sat looking at it for a long while before he dared touch it, and then his whole face lit up. He asked doctors to leave one scar on his forehead as a reminder.[1] [2] [3]

Recovery was slow. For about a year he needed medication and suffered headaches and exhaustion, and his planned tour was called off. But on the twenty fifth of September 1973, only seven weeks after the crash, he flew with Elton John to Boston and walked on at Elton's show at the Boston Garden. They jammed on Honky Tonk Women and Superstition, and Stevie later called it the start of his public recovery. He came to believe the crash had happened for a reason. At the Grammys in early 1974 he won a string of awards, including his first Album of the Year for Innervisions, with his mother beside him. In March he opened a sold out Madison Square Garden show by thanking God that he was alive.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The peak: Fulfillingness and Songs in the Key of Life

In March 1974 he joined a now famous jam session in Burbank with John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Harry Nilsson and others. It was the only time Lennon and McCartney are known to have played together after the Beatles split, and the tape, later bootlegged, is remembered more for the drugs going round than the music. Stevie's own next album, Fulfillingness' First Finale, came out that July. It was quieter and more personal, but it also had You Haven't Done Nothin', a furious swipe at Richard Nixon with the Jackson Five singing backup. Nixon resigned two days after the single appeared. The album topped the chart and won Stevie a second Album of the Year.[1] [2] [3]

He was producing others too. He wrote Tell Me Something Good for Rufus and Chaka Khan, and co-produced Minnie Riperton's album Perfect Angel. Riperton had sung backing vocals in his band, Wonderlove. Then, in early 1975, he began talking about quitting music altogether and moving to Ghana to work with disabled children. He even floated a farewell concert. Instead, on the fifth of August 1975, he signed a new Motown deal, seven years and seven albums, with an advance of thirteen million dollars, twenty percent royalties and ownership of his publishing. It was the biggest recording contract in history at the time. Gordy said he was shaking in his boots, but he could not lose Stevie.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The new album took far longer than anyone expected. Sessions ran across Crystal Sound in Hollywood, the Record Plant in Los Angeles and Sausalito, and the Hit Factory in New York. Stevie worked around the clock, sometimes for forty eight hours at a time, and phoned musicians back to the studio in the middle of the night. More than a hundred and thirty people contributed, including Herbie Hancock, George Benson and Minnie Riperton. His engineers reckoned he recorded something like two hundred songs. The staff printed T shirts asking whether they were finished yet. Meanwhile, in February 1975, his partner Yolanda Simmons had given birth to their daughter Aisha, and fatherhood poured into the music.[1] [2] [3]

Songs in the Key of Life finally arrived on the twenty eighth of September 1976, a double album with a bonus four song record tucked inside. It entered the Billboard chart at number one, the first album by an American artist ever to do that, and stayed on top for fourteen weeks. I Wish, a joyful look back at his childhood written after a Motown picnic, and Sir Duke, a tribute to Duke Ellington, both went to number one. Isn't She Lovely, written for Aisha, was never a single because Stevie refused to cut it down, yet radio played it anyway. Pastime Paradise and Village Ghetto Land showed his darker side. It won Album of the Year, his third in four years.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Stevie missed that Grammy night because he was in Nigeria exploring his musical roots. A satellite link was set up so he could accept from Nigeria, but the picture was poor, and the host Andy Williams awkwardly asked him whether he could see them. A year earlier, when Paul Simon won Album of the Year, he had thanked Stevie Wonder for not making an album that year. By now the sweep was complete. Innervisions, Fulfillingness' First Finale and Songs in the Key of Life made him the only artist ever to win Album of the Year with three consecutive albums, and Rolling Stone would later place Songs in the Key of Life fourth among the greatest albums of all time.[1] [2] [3]

Plants, protest and a national holiday

After three years of waiting, fans got something nobody expected. Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants, released in October 1979, was a mostly instrumental soundtrack to a documentary about plants. Stevie scored it by having the film's producer describe each image to him in detail. It was one of the first albums recorded digitally, and among the first to use a sampling synthesizer. Early copies were scented with flower perfume, until it turned out the perfume damaged the vinyl. Send One Your Love reached number four, but sales faded fast, and Gordy reportedly grumbled that he had pressed a million copies, nine hundred thousand too many. That same year Stevie bought the Los Angeles radio station KJLH.[1] [2]

The summer of 1979 also brought a loss. Minnie Riperton, whose voice he had helped showcase, died of cancer in July. She died in her husband's arms at Cedars-Sinai while listening to a recording Stevie had made for her. He paid tribute to her on Soul Train that September. His answer to the Plants disappointment was Hotter than July in 1980, recorded at his own Wonderland Studios. It opened with Master Blaster, Jammin', a reggae tribute to Bob Marley, with whom he toured that autumn. It included the ballad Lately. It became his first album certified platinum, and in Britain it produced four top ten singles.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The heart of Hotter than July was a cause. Stevie wrote Happy Birthday to push for Martin Luther King Junior's birthday to become a national holiday in the United States. The album sleeve carried a portrait of King and a personal appeal signed with a thumbprint, and he held a Rally for Peace press conference in 1981. A petition to Congress gathered around six million signatures. On the second of November 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed the holiday into law, and when it was first observed, on the twentieth of January 1986, Stevie headlined the celebration concert. Happy Birthday was never released as a single in America, but in Britain it reached number two.[1] [2] [3]

In early 1981 Paul McCartney invited Stevie to the island of Montserrat to record Ebony and Ivory, a plea for racial harmony built on the black and white keys of a piano. Released in 1982, it spent seven weeks at number one in America, the longest run of either man's career, and made Stevie the first solo artist with a US number one in three consecutive decades. That year he also added four new songs to a greatest hits set, including Front Line, told by a bitter Vietnam veteran. In April 1984 he sang at the funeral of Marvin Gaye, who had been shot dead by his own father. Stevie performed a song he wrote for the occasion.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Then came his biggest seller of all. I Just Called to Say I Love You, from the soundtrack to Gene Wilder's film The Woman in Red, topped the charts in the United States and some twenty eight countries, and it was his only solo number one in Britain. In March 1985 it won the Oscar for Best Original Song, and Stevie dedicated the award to Nelson Mandela, then still in prison. The South African Broadcasting Corporation promptly banned his music from the radio, and even Ebony and Ivory disappeared from the airwaves there. Later that year, on his thirty fifth birthday, a United Nations committee against apartheid honoured him for that stand.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Duets, charity and a slower pace

In January 1985 Stevie was one of the stars in the room for We Are the World, the charity single for famine relief in Africa. He greeted the singers at the door and joked that if they did not finish in one take, he and Ray Charles would drive everyone home. Late in the night he suggested a line sung in Swahili, which caused an argument, and the country singer Waylon Jennings walked out for a while. Stevie sang a duet passage with Bruce Springsteen. The following year he joined Dionne Warwick, Elton John and Gladys Knight on That's What Friends Are For, which raised more than three million dollars for AIDS research and was the biggest American single of 1986.[1] [2] [3]

His album In Square Circle arrived in September 1985. Its single Part-Time Lover, with Luther Vandross singing the ad libs, went to number one on four different Billboard charts at once, a first for any artist. It remains his last number one pop hit. The album also carried the ballad Overjoyed. Around this time his harmonica turned up everywhere, on Chaka Khan's I Feel for You, Eurythmics' There Must Be an Angel and Elton John's I Guess That's Why They Call It the Blues. In 1987 he duetted with Michael Jackson on Jackson's album Bad, and Jackson returned the favour on Stevie's album Characters, which topped the R&B chart but stalled at seventeen on the pop chart.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1990 Stevie had to defend his biggest hit in court. A songwriter named Lloyd Chiate sued him for twenty five million dollars, claiming that he and Lee Garrett had written I Just Called to Say I Love You years before. Garrett switched sides and testified for Stevie, who said he had first sketched the song in a car in July 1976. After two weeks of evidence, a Los Angeles jury took only three and a half hours to find in Stevie's favour. He told reporters that the awards meant nothing compared to his dignity, and that it had hurt him deeply that anyone thought he would steal a song.[1] [2]

The nineties moved more slowly. In 1991 he made the soundtrack for Spike Lee's film Jungle Fever, which closed with Lighting Up the Candles, the song he had written for Marvin Gaye's funeral. In 1992 he performed at the Panafest festival in Ghana and later said that within eighteen hours he knew he wanted to live there one day. Invited back by President Jerry Rawlings, he wrote dozens of songs there, and some became Conversation Peace in 1995, with Syreeta singing backup and Robert Margouleff back in the studio. He sang at the closing ceremony of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award that year, and played the Super Bowl halftime show in 1999.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In December 1999 Stevie said he was interested in an experimental retinal implant being developed at Johns Hopkins University that might give him partial sight. He met the surgeon behind it, though the university stressed the treatment worked best for people who had once been able to see, and nothing came of it publicly. By then he had long been a pioneer of technology for blind people. In 1976 he had become the first owner of a production Kurzweil Reading Machine, which read printed text aloud, and in 1982 he challenged the inventor Ray Kurzweil to build a synthesizer that sounded like real acoustic instruments. The result was the Kurzweil K250, unveiled in 1984.[1] [2] [3]

Loss, love and a second act

On the sixth of July 2004, Syreeta Wright died of cancer at her home in Los Angeles, aged fifty eight. Her sister said she and Stevie had remained true friends right to the end, and Stevie spoke of her as a lyricist who painted pictures with words. The following year he released A Time to Love, his first album of new songs in a decade, featuring his daughter Aisha and a duet with India Arie. Reviews were lukewarm. Then, on the thirty first of May 2006, his mother Lula Mae Hardaway died in Los Angeles at seventy six. Her loss pushed him back on the road, and in 2008 he opened his first European tour in a decade.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The Obama years brought him into the White House more than once. Barack Obama called Stevie his one musical hero, and in February 2009 presented him with the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize, joking that Michelle might not have married him if he had not been a Stevie Wonder fan. In 2014 Obama gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His private life was eventful. He had separated from his second wife, the designer Kai Millard, in 2009, and filed for divorce in 2012. He married Tomeeka Robyn Bracy in 2017. In all he has nine children with five women, including Aisha, Keita, Mumtaz, Kailand, Mandla, Sophia, Kwame, Zaiah and Nia.[1] [2]

Stevie never stopped taking stands. In July 2013, after George Zimmerman was acquitted of killing the teenager Trayvon Martin, he announced at a concert in Quebec that he would not perform in Florida, or anywhere with a stand your ground law, until those laws were abolished. At a Hyde Park concert in July 2019 he told the crowd he needed a kidney transplant and already had a donor, and the operation was carried out in December. In October 2020 he left Motown after nearly sixty years, launching his own label through Republic Records with two protest songs, one of them raising money for Feeding America. He said he felt about forty.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 2021 he duetted with Elton John on Finish Line, and footage of his nineteen year old self at the Harlem festival of 1969 opened the documentary Summer of Soul. In August 2024 he performed Higher Ground at the Democratic National Convention and released a new song, Can We Fix Our Nation's Broken Heart. On his seventy fourth birthday, the thirteenth of May 2024, he took an oath of allegiance at Jubilee House in Accra and became a Ghanaian citizen, fulfilling a dream he said he had held for fifty years. It was his son Mandla's birthday too, and father and son cut a cake in red, gold and green.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the twenty eighth of September 2026, exactly fifty years after Songs in the Key of Life came out, Stevie surprised fans with an EP of four unheard songs from those sessions, It's Easier, My Life Story of Love, I Can See the Sun in Late December and I'm Into Livin'. He chose them himself, and the album's original engineers came back to mix them. He also announced a fiftieth anniversary tour playing the whole album, starting in Birmingham, England, on the thirteenth of October and ending at the Intuit Dome in Los Angeles on the nineteenth of December. As of 2026 his long promised albums, including Through the Eyes of Wonder, remain unreleased.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The legacy

The numbers are staggering. As of 2026 Stevie Wonder has won twenty five Grammy Awards, the most by any male solo artist, plus an Oscar and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. He has had ten number one pop singles in America and twenty number one R&B singles, and sold more than a hundred million records. He is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Only a handful of artists have won Album of the Year three times, and he is the only one to do it with three albums in a row. Detroit named part of his childhood street Stevie Wonder Avenue in 2016.[1]

His influence runs everywhere. The run from Music of My Mind to Songs in the Key of Life showed that a soul artist could make whole albums as statements, and that synthesizers could sound warm and human. Kanye West once said he was not competing with anything on the radio, but with Innervisions and Songs in the Key of Life. Elton John said he carried a copy of Songs in the Key of Life wherever he went. Coolio built Gangsta's Paradise on Pastime Paradise, and Will Smith built Wild Wild West on I Wish. Even heavy metal players cite him, and the drummer Gene Hoglan credits Stevie with inventing the blast beat.[1] [2]

He has kept exploring well into his seventies. In 2012 he tried a strange new instrument called the harpejji at a trade show in California, a cross between a piano and a guitar, and asked how soon he could have one. His performances with it helped its inventor sell well over a thousand. He has performed Songs in the Key of Life in full since 2013, first at a charity show for children and then on tour. From a blind child on a two dollar fifty weekly allowance, Stevland Morris became one of the defining musicians of the century, and as of 2026, he is still on the road.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The people around Stevie Wonder

Stevie Wonder and Lula Mae Hardaway. His mother moved her children from Saginaw to Detroit, took him to his Motown audition and co-wrote hits like I Was Made to Love Her and Signed, Sealed, Delivered, earning a Grammy nomination. She sat beside him at the 1974 Grammys. Her death in 2006 sent him back on tour, and he planned a gospel album in her name.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Stevie Wonder and Berry Gordy. Gordy signed him at eleven, nearly dropped him when his voice broke and vetoed For Once in My Life. When Stevie turned twenty one he forced Gordy to grant real freedom, and in 1975 extracted the biggest deal in music. Gordy admitted he was shaking in his boots, but said he could not lose Stevie. Stevie called Gordy brave.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Stevie Wonder and Clarence Paul. Clarence Paul was his first mentor and producer at Motown, co-writing Fingertips and singing alongside him on Blowin' in the Wind. He guided the boy through his first albums and his early teenage years. Paul, whose brother co-founded the Five Royales, later moved to Los Angeles and died in 1995.[1] [2] [3]

Stevie Wonder and Syreeta Wright. A Motown secretary turned singer, Syreeta married Stevie in September 1970 and wrote lyrics for his breakthrough albums. The marriage lasted about eighteen months, and she later said it was not a happy time. Their friendship outlived it. He produced her albums, she sang on his records until 1995, and her sister said they stayed close until her death in 2004.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Stevie Wonder and Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff. The two builders of the TONTO synthesizer were his associate producers and engineers on four classic albums, winning a Grammy for Innervisions. They pushed him toward political themes and even provoked him to get an angry vocal on Living for the City. Margouleff compared the partnership to three meteors crossing for one brilliant flash.[1] [2] [3]

Stevie Wonder and Jeff Beck. Beck admired Stevie and played on Talking Book in exchange for a song. That song was Superstition, and when Motown released Stevie's version first, Beck was crushed. Stevie apologised but criticised Beck's remarks. The rift passed, and Beck later recorded Stevie's Cause We've Ended as Lovers on Blow by Blow.[1] [2] [3]

Stevie Wonder and Minnie Riperton. Riperton sang in his band Wonderlove and on his albums, and he co-produced her album Perfect Angel, which gave her the hit Lovin' You. When she died of cancer in 1979, she was listening to a recording Stevie had made for her. He later sang on her posthumous album.[1]

Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney. They jammed together with John Lennon in 1974, then recorded Ebony and Ivory in Montserrat in 1981, filming their video parts separately because of their schedules. The song gave both men a seven week American number one, though critics later mocked it as simplistic.[1] [2]

Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye. Gaye played drums on Fingertips before becoming a star. Both men fought Motown for creative freedom around 1971, and critics compared their socially conscious albums. When Gaye was killed in 1984, Stevie wrote and sang a song at his funeral.[1] [2] [3]

Stevie Wonder and Elton John. They met in 1971, when Stevie greeted Elton at Heathrow singing Your Song. Seven weeks after his 1973 crash, Stevie made his first public comeback on stage with Elton in Boston. They recorded That's What Friends Are For together, and in 2021 released the duet Finish Line.[1] [2] [3]

Stevie Wonder and Yolanda Simmons. Simmons met Stevie when she applied for a job as secretary at his publishing company. Their daughter Aisha, born in 1975, inspired Isn't She Lovely and later sang with her father on tour, and their son Keita followed in 1977.[1] [2] [3]

Stevie Wonder and Barack Obama. Obama called Stevie his one musical hero, used Signed, Sealed, Delivered at campaign rallies and chose You and I as his wedding song. He gave Stevie the Gershwin Prize in 2009 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Stevie Wonder

• As a child star, Stevie's own allowance from Motown was two dollars and fifty cents a week. His royalties were held in trust until he turned twenty one, and he and his mother lived on a weekly stipend. A private tutor travelled with him on tour.[1]
• On the live Fingertips, a bass player can be heard shouting out to ask what key the band is in. Stevie made an unplanned encore after the band had started changing over for Mary Wells. The incoming bassist, Joe Swift, was caught completely off guard.[1]
• Marvin Gaye played drums on both versions of Fingertips. Before his own fame, Gaye worked as a Motown session drummer, and he played on both the studio and live versions of Stevie's first hit.[1] [2]
• At thirteen, Stevie became the youngest solo artist to top the Billboard album chart. Recorded Live: The 12 Year Old Genius went to number one in 1963, riding on the success of Fingertips. It was the last album billed to Little Stevie.[1]
• Stevie recorded Uptight by repeating each line as Sylvia Moy sang it to him. Moy had finished the lyrics but had no braille copy, so she sang each line a moment ahead of him through the session. She said he never missed a beat.[1] [2]
• In 1968 Stevie released an album under the name Eivets Rednow. It is his name spelled backwards, and his real name did not appear on the original cover. The record was all instrumentals, with Stevie on harmonica rather than vocals.[1]
• Stevie competed at Italy's Sanremo festival in 1969. He performed Se tu ragazzo mio with Gabriella Ferri, and around that time he recorded Italian singles and an Italian album.[1]
• The Tears of a Clown began as an instrumental Stevie brought to a Motown Christmas party. He could not find words for it, so he gave it to Smokey Robinson in 1966. Robinson heard a circus in it, and the record features a rare pop bassoon.[1]
• Talking Book got its name from a joke by Malcolm Cecil. Struggling to get Stevie to pick songs, Cecil told him it was an album, not a talking book. Stevie liked the phrase and kept it.[1]
• Early copies of Talking Book carried a message in braille. The title, Stevie's name and a short personal note were embossed on the sleeve, and the note was only printed in ordinary type decades later.[1]
• The TONTO synthesizer weighed about a ton and now lives in a museum in Canada. Malcolm Cecil sold it in 2013 to the National Music Centre in Calgary, which spent five years restoring it.[1] [2]
• For some backing vocals on Living for the City, Stevie sang along to a tape running faster or slower. Changing the tape speed made his voice sound higher or lower than normal when played back, so he could harmonise with different versions of himself.[1]
• Stevie asked doctors to leave one scar on his forehead after the 1973 crash. He wanted it as a reminder of what he had survived. His son Kwame was later born on the sixth of August 1988, the crash's anniversary.[1]
• A hospital security guard became a lifelong friend after the crash. During two weeks in hospital in Winston-Salem, Stevie befriended a guard named Larry Woolard, and later went to his wedding.[1]
• Stevie met Elton John at Heathrow in 1971 by singing Your Song to him. Elton had come to greet him at the airport. Two years later Elton's Boston show became Stevie's first public appearance after the crash.[1]
• The funky clavinet on Higher Ground ran through a Mu-Tron wah pedal. The Mu-Tron three envelope filter gave the track its wah sound, while the bass was a Moog synthesizer programmed by Cecil and Margouleff.[1]
• Boogie On Reggae Woman is neither boogie nor reggae. Despite the title it is a funk track, and Stevie plays a diatonic blues harp on it rather than his usual chromatic harmonica.[1]
• Motown incinerated two hundred thousand copies of a Stevie hits package. His 1975 contract gave him vetoes, and a planned triple disc greatest hits album was cancelled at his insistence, with every copy destroyed.[1]
• Stevie's 1975 contract meant Motown could not be sold without his permission. Rolling Stone noted that no Beatle, no Elvis and no Sinatra ever held that much power over their own label.[1]
• The song Saturn was meant to be about Saginaw. Stevie planned a tribute to his hometown, but guitarist Michael Sembello misheard the title as Saturn, and the song headed into outer space instead.[1]
• About a hundred Hare Krishna chanters were brought in for Pastime Paradise, and Stevie did not show up. Engineers recruited them on Hollywood Boulevard. They chanted in the studio for hours, then had to walk back and return another day.[1]
• Stevie bought two Yamaha GX-1 synthesizers, which cost sixty thousand dollars each. He called the huge machine the Dream Machine and used it on Village Ghetto Land and Pastime Paradise.[1]
• At the Songs in the Key of Life launch, Stevie turned up dressed as a cowboy. Journalists were flown to a farm in Massachusetts, where he arrived in a ten gallon hat and a holster reading Number One With A Bullet.[1]
• Early copies of the Secret Life of Plants album were scented with flower perfume. The scent was dropped when it turned out to damage the vinyl. The cover also carried a caption in braille.[1]
• Stevie owns the Los Angeles radio station KJLH. He bought it in 1979 for more than two million dollars and gave it the slogan Kindness, Joy, Love and Happiness. It is the oldest Black owned station on the West Coast.[1]
• Stevie was the first person to own a production Kurzweil Reading Machine. He heard about the machine, which read printed text aloud, on the Today Show in 1976. The friendship later led Ray Kurzweil into building synthesizers.[1] [2]
• I Just Called to Say I Love You is Motown's biggest selling single in Britain. It spent six weeks at number one there, his only solo UK chart topper, and reached number one in some twenty eight countries.[1]
• Part-Time Lover was the first song to hit number one on four Billboard charts at once. It topped the Hot 100, R&B, dance and adult contemporary charts in 1985, with Luther Vandross singing the ad libs.[1]
• During We Are the World, Stevie joked that he and Ray Charles would drive everyone home. He greeted the stars at the door and said that if they did not nail it in one take, the two blind men would be at the wheel.[1]
• France named Stevie a Commander of Arts and Letters in 1981 but only presented it in 2010. Scheduling problems delayed the ceremony for nearly thirty years. The culture minister told him he had just called to say France loved him.[1]
• Stevie plays the harpejji, a rare cross between a piano and a guitar. He tried one at a California trade show in 2012 and asked how soon he could have one. His playing helped its inventor sell around fifteen hundred.[1]
• Newcastle upon Tyne gave Stevie the freedom of the city in 2023. It honoured his campaign for the Martin Luther King holiday. King had received an honorary degree from Newcastle University in 1967.[1]
• In 2016 Detroit renamed part of his childhood street Stevie Wonder Avenue. A stretch of Milwaukee Avenue West was renamed, and the mayor gave him a key to the city on the day the sign was unveiled.[1]
• A heavy metal drummer credits Stevie with inventing the blast beat. Gene Hoglan of Dark Angel made the claim, and Mastodon's drummer has also named Stevie as a major influence.[1]
• Stevie became a Ghanaian citizen on his seventy fourth birthday, which was also his son Mandla's birthday. Mandla was born on Stevie's fifty fifth birthday in 2005. At the 2024 ceremony in Accra they cut a cake together.[1] [2]
• Where Is Our Love Song began as a melody Stevie wrote at eighteen. He finished the lyrics fifty years later in 2020 and gave all his proceeds to Feeding America.[1]
• Stevie wrote Tell Me Something Good for Rufus and Chaka Khan. The 1974 song sold over a million copies and gave the band its first Grammy.[1]
• Songs in the Key of Life counted as ten million units for its Diamond award, but sold five million. The RIAA counts each disc separately, and the album came as two records plus a bonus single, so five million copies qualified.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.