Stevie Wonder (born Stevland Hardaway Judkins on May 13, 1950, name later changed to Stevland Hardaway Morris), is an American singer, songwriter, and record producer. Wonder has recorded more than thirty Top 10 hits, won twenty-two Grammy Awards (a record for a solo artist), plus one for lifetime achievement, won an Academy Award for Best Song and been inducted into both the Rock and Roll and Songwriters halls of fame. Opera star Luciano Pavarotti once referred to him in a concert as a "great, great musical genius".

Blind from infancy, Wonder signed with Motown Records as an adolescent of age 11, and continues to perform and record for the label to this day. He has become one of the most successful and well-known artists in the world, with nine U.S. number-one hits to his name and album sales totaling more than 100 million units. Wonder has recorded several critically acclaimed albums and hit singles, and writes and produces songs for many of his labelmates and outside artists as well. A multi-instrumentalist, Wonder plays the drums, congas, bass guitar, organ, harmonica, melodica, piano and synthesizer. In his early career, he was best known for his harmonica work, but today he is better known for his keyboard skills.

Stevland Judkins was born prematurely in Saginaw, Michigan to Lula Mae Hardaway on May 13, 1950. It is thought that he received excessive oxygen in his incubator which led to retinopathy of prematurity, a destructive ocular disorder affecting the retina, characterized by abnormal growth of blood vessels, scarring, and sometimes retinal detachment. Mrs. Hardaway instructed her other children (there would eventually be four boys and one girl in the home) to treat Stevland the same as any other child, and not to tease or over-assist him because of his blindness. As a result, Stevland had a balanced childhood. The family moved to Detroit, Michigan and Stevland began singing and playing instruments in church at an early age. He took to the piano, congas, and harmonica in particular.

He was educated at the Michigan School for the Blind in Lansing, Michigan where he was trained in classical piano.

Early career, 1962–1971

In 1962, at the age of 12, Morris was introduced to Ronnie White of the popular Motown act The Miracles. White brought Morris and his mother to Motown Records. Impressed by the young musician, Motown CEO Berry Gordy signed Morris to Motown's Tamla label with the name Little Stevie Wonder.

At the age of 13, Little Stevie Wonder had his first major hit, "Fingertips (Pt. 2)", a 1963 single taken from a live recording of a Motown Revue performance. The song, featuring Wonder on vocals, congas, and harmonica, and a young Marvin Gaye on drums, was a #1 hit on the US pop charts and launched him into the public consciousness. Dropping the "Little" from his moniker, Wonder went on to have a number of other hits during the mid-1960s, including "Uptight (Everything's Alright)", "With a Child's Heart", and "Blowin' in the Wind", a Bob Dylan cover which was one of the first songs to reflect Wonder's social consciousness. He also began to work in the Motown songwriting department, composing songs both for himself and his labelmates.

By 1970, Wonder had scored more major hits, including "I Was Made to Love Her", "For Once in My Life", "My Cherie Amour", and "Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours". Besides being one of the first songs on which Wonder serves as both songwriter and producer, "Signed, Sealed, Delivered" is one of the main showcases for his backup group Wonderlove, a trio which included at various times Minnie Riperton, Deniece Williams, Lynda Laurence, and Syreeta Wright, whom Wonder married on September 14, 1970. Wonder and Wright divorced eighteen months later, but they continued to collaborate on musical projects.

Along with Marvin Gaye, Wonder was one of the few Motown stars to contest the label's factory-like operation methods: artists, songwriters, and producers were usually kept in specialized collectives with little or no overlap, and artists had no creative control. Wonder argued with Berry Gordy over creative control a number of times. As a compromise, Motown released an album under the name "Eivets Rednow" ("Stevie Wonder" backwards). These arguments continued, and Wonder allowed his Motown contract to expire. He left the label on his twenty-first birthday in 1971. His final album before his departure was Where I'm Coming From, which Gordy had strongly fought against releasing.

Classic period, 1972–1976

Wonder independently recorded two albums, which he used as a bargaining tool while negotiating with Motown. Eventually, the label agreed to his demands for full creative control and the rights to his own songs, and Wonder returned to Motown in March 1972 with Music of My Mind, an album which is considered a classic of the era. Unlike most previous artist LPs on Motown, which usually consisted of a collection of singles, b-sides, and covers, Music of My Mind was an actual LP, a full-length artistic statement, and began a string of five albums released over a period of less than five years, that make up what is generally considered Stevie Wonder's classic period.

October 1972's Talking Book featured the #1 pop and R&B hit "Superstition", which is one of the most distinctive examples of the sound of the clavinet. The song, originally intended for rock guitarist Jeff Beck, features a rocking groove that garnered Wonder an additional audience on rock radio stations. Wonder also performed this song on an episode of Sesame Street in the 1970s. Wonder's audience was further broadened when he opened for The Rolling Stones on their much-heralded 1972 American Tour. Wonder's pop following was not neglected, however, as "You Are the Sunshine of My Life" followed to #1 on the pop charts and has been a staple love song for the decades since. Between them, the songs won three Grammy Awards.

Wonder's critical and popular acclaim only increased less than a year later, in August 1973, when he released what is often called his best album, Innervisions. Political considerations were brought into greater focus than ever before, with the driving, percolating "Higher Ground" (#4 on the pop charts) followed by the memorable epic "Living for the City" (#8), which found Wonder more evocatively describing a time and place in American life than he would anywhere else in his career. Popular ballads such as "Golden Lady" and "All in Love Is Fair" were also present, in a mixture of moods that nevertheless held together as a unified whole. The album generated three more Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year.

On August 6, 1973, just days after the release of Innervisions, Wonder was in a serious automobile accident while on tour, when a log from a truck went through a passenger window and struck him in the head. This left him in a coma for four days and resulted in a permanent loss of his sense of smell.

Despite the setback, Wonder eventually recovered all of his musical faculties, and reappeared in concert at Madison Square Garden in March 1974 in a performance that highlighted both up-tempo material and long, building improvisations on mid-tempo songs such as "Living for the City". The album Fulfillingness' First Finale then appeared in July 1974 with a more personal, introspective outlook, but nevertheless sent two hits high on the pop charts. The Album of the Year was again one of three Grammys won.

On October 5, 1975, Wonder performed the historical Wonder Dream Concert in Kingston, Jamaica, a Jamaican Institute for the Blind benefit concert. Along with Wonder Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer, the three original "Wailers", performed together for the last time.

By 1975, in his 25th year, Stevie Wonder had won two consecutive Grammy Awards: in 1974 for Innervisions and in 1975 for Fulfillingness' First Finale. The following year, singer songwriter Paul Simon won the Grammy for Album of the Year for Still Crazy After All These Years. In his Grammy acceptance speech, Simon jokingly thanked Stevie Wonder for not releasing an album that year. Simon's relief was short-lived, however; in 1977 Stevie Wonder re-took the best album Grammy Award for Songs In The Key Of Life.

Wonder then focused his attentions on what he intended as his magnum opus, the double album-with-extra-EP Songs in the Key of Life, released in September 1976. Sprawling in style, unlimited in ambition, and sometimes lyrically difficult to fathom, the album was hard for some listeners to fully assimilate. Two tracks fairly jumped out of the radio with energy, however, becoming the #1 hits "I Wish" and "Sir Duke". "Isn't She Lovely" was a future wedding and bat mitzvah fixture, while songs such as "Love's in Need of Love Today" (which years later Wonder would perform at the post-September 11, 2001 America: A Tribute to Heroes telethon) and the classical "Village Ghetto Land" reflected a far more pensive mood. "Pastime Paradise" would become an interpolation for Coolio's "Gangsta's Paradise" (one of the most popular hits of the 1990s). In addition to the Album of the Year award, Wonder garnered two other Grammys.

Possibly exhausted by this concentrated and sustained level of creativity, Wonder stopped recording for three years. Nevertheless his output during this stretch had left its mark: the 1983 Rolling Stone Record Guide said that these albums "pioneered stylistic approaches that helped to determine the shape of pop music for the next decade"; Rolling Stone's 2003 list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time included four of the five, with three in the top 90; while in 2005 Kanye West said of his own work, "I'm not trying to compete with what's out there now. I'm really trying to compete with Innervisions and Songs in the Key of Life. It sounds musically blasphemous to say something like that, but why not set that as your bar?"

Commercial period, 1979–1990

It was in Wonder's next phase that he began to commercially reap the rewards of his legendary Classic period. The 80's saw Wonder scoring his biggest hits and reaching an unprecendent level of fame- evidenced by increased album sales, charity participation, high-profile collaborations, and television appearances.

This period had a muted beginning, for when Wonder did return, it was with a soundtrack album for the film Journey through the Secret Life of Plants (1979). Mostly instrumental, the album was panned at the time of its release but has come to be regarded by some critics as an unusual classic. Hotter than July (1980) became Wonder's first platinum selling album, and its single "Happy Birthday" was a successful vehicle for his campaign to establish Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday as a national holiday. The album also included "Master Blaster (Jammin')", his tribute to Bob Marley, and the sentimental ballad, "Lately", which was later covered by 1990s R&B act Jodeci.

In 1982, Wonder released a retrospective of his '70s work with Stevie Wonder's Original Musiquarium and included three more hit singles in his catalogue, including the ten-minute funk classic "Do I Do" (which included legendary jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie), "That Girl" (one of the year's biggest singles to chart on the R&B side) and "Ribbon in the Sky", one of his many classic compositions. Wonder also gained a #1 hit that year in collaboration with Paul McCartney in their paean to racial harmony, "Ebony and Ivory".

1984 saw the release of Wonder's soundtrack album for The Woman in Red. The lead single, "I Just Called to Say I Love You", was a #1 pop and R&B hit in both the US and UK, where it was placed 13th in the all-time list of best-selling singles in the UK issued in 2002. It went on to win an Academy Award for "Best Song" in 1985. The following year's In Square Circle featured the #1 pop hit "Part-Time Lover". He was also featured in Chaka Khan's cover of Prince's "I Feel For You", alongside Melle Mel, playing his signature harmonica, which was a huge hit. In roughly the same period he was also featured on harmonica on Eurythmics' single, "There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart)" and Elton John's "I Guess That's Why They Call It The Blues," both huge hits.

By 1985 Stevie Wonder was an American icon, the subject of good-humored jokes about blindness and affectionately impersonated by Eddie Murphy on Saturday Night Live. He was in a featured duet with Bruce Springsteen on the all-star charity single for African famine relief, "We Are the World", and he was part of another charity single the following year, the AIDS-targeted "That's What Friends Are For".

Also in 1985, Wonder performed "Go Home" from his album In Square Circle, at the Grammy awards ceremony in Los Angeles in the infamoussynthesizer jam along with Thomas Dolby, Howard Jones and Herbie Hancock.

In 1986, Stevie Wonder appeared on The Cosby Show as himself.

In 1987 Wonder appeared on the duet Just Good Friends for Michael Jackson's Bad album.

Wonder has also recorded with Jon Gibson (Christian Soul Musician), in particular a remake of his own song "Have a Talk With God" covered by Gibson which Wonder plays harmonica in (there is an extreme resemblance in sound and style that Gibson has to Wonder) in the late-80s after meeting him in mid-80s.

Later career, 1991–present

After 1987's Characters LP, Wonder continued to release new material, albeit at a slower pace. He recorded a soundtrack album for Spike Lee's film Jungle Fever in 1991 with a video for "Gotta Have You", and released both Conversation Peace and the live album Natural Wonder during the same decade.

In 1996, Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life was selected as a documentary subject for the Classic Albums documentary series. This series dedicates 60 minutes to one, groundbreaking record per feature. Wonder collaborated with Babyface for an emotionally-charged song about spousal abuse (domestic violence) called "How Come How Long" which was also nominated for an award and had video rotation on t.v.

That year, he performed John Lennon's song "Imagine" in the closing ceremony of the Olympics, held in Atlanta.

Stevie Wonder also performed in a unique remix of "Seasons Of Love" from the Jonathan Larson musical Rent which can be found on disc two of the cast original Broadway cast recording.

In December 1999, Wonder announced that he was interested in pursuing an intraocular retinal prosthesis to partially restore his sight.

In March 2002, Wonder performed at the opening ceremonies of the 2002 Winter Paralympics in Salt Lake City.

In 2004, Rolling Stone Magazine ranked him #15 on their list of the 100 Greatest Rock and Roll Artists of All Time.

On July 2, 2005, Wonder performed in the USA part of the "Live 8" series of concerts in Philadelphia

Wonder's first new album in ten years, A Time to Love, was released on October 18, 2005, after having been pushed back from first a May, and then a June release. The album was released electronically on September 27, 2005, exclusively on Apple's iTunes Music Store. The first single, "So What the Fuss", was released in April and features Prince on guitar and background vocals from En Vogue. A second single, "From the Bottom of My Heart" was a hit on adult-contemporary R&B radio. The album also featured a duet with India.Arie on the title track "A Time to Love".

Wonder performed at the pre-game show for Super Bowl XL in Detroit in early 2006, singing various hit singles (with his four-year-old son on drums) and accompanying Aretha Franklin during "The Star Spangled Banner".

In March 2006, Wonder received new national exposure on the top-rated American Idol television program. Each of 12 contestants were required to sing one of his songs, after having met and received guidance from him. (Some of the contestants idolized Wonder, while others showed little familiarity with his work.) Wonder also performed "My Love Is on Fire" live on the show itself. Most recently, in June 2006, Stevie Wonder made a guest appearance on Busta Rhymes' new album, The Big Bang on the track "Been through the Storm" he sings the refrain and plays the piano on the Dr. Dre and Sha Money XL produced track. He appeared again on the last track of Snoop Dogg's new album, Tha Blue Carpet Treatment, "Conversations". The song is a remake of "Have a Talk with God" from Songs in the Key of Life. It is also rumored that he will appear on Bone Thugs-n-Harmony's new album, Strength and Loyalty.

Stevie Wonder also performed at the Nation's Capitol's 2006 "A Capitol Fourth" celebration, which was hosted by actor star Jason Alexander.

Impact

Wonder's success as a socially conscious musical performer was significantly influential to both R&B and pop music. Among the musicians and performers who list Wonder as one of their major influences are George Michael, Gloria Estefan, Alicia Keys, Avia, Mariah Carey, Tim Foreman (Switchfoot), Mary J. Blige, Kanye West, George Michael, Jermaine Jackson, Michael Jackson, Nik Kershaw, Anthony Kiedis (Red Hot Chili Peppers), Sting, India.Arie, Musiq Soulchild, John Legend, Jason Kay (Jamiroquai), Donell Jones, and the members of Jodeci, Maroon 5, the Neptunes, Dru Hill, Babyface, Beyoncé Knowles, Nicholas Jonas (Jonas Brothers), John Farnham, Jon Gibson and Aaliyah.

His songs are renowned for being hard and demanding to sing. There are many 9th, 11th and 13th chords. His melodies make abrupt, unpredictable changes. His songs are melismatic, meaning that a syllable of a word is sung over different notes. In the American Idol Hollywood Performances, judge Randy Jackson repeatedly stated the difficulty of Wonder's songs. Some of his best known and most frequently covered songs are played in keys which are more often found in jazz than in pop bands. For example, Superstition, Higher Ground and I Wish are all in the key of E flat, and all feature distinctive riffs that are played in the E flat minor pentatonic scale (i.e. largely on the black notes of the keyboard).

Personal life

He is an active supporter of the United States Democratic Party and an activist for civil rights. He has seven children. His youngest son, Mandla Kadjay Carl Stevland Morris, was born on May 13, 2005, and is the second son of Wonder and his current wife, fashion designer Kai Milla Morris. Their first son is named Kailand. His daughter, Aisha Morris, is a singer, and was the baby heard on his hit single "Isn't She Lovely". He was previously married to singer Syreeta Wright.

Cultural references

In the 1980s cult movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off, a student claims that a supposedly deathly ill Ferris Bueller is going to donate his eyes to Stevie Wonder, making reference to the singer's blindness.

In The Game's song, "Dreams", he says "I had dreams of makin' a classic, then my world turned black like I was lookin' out of Stevie Wonder's glasses."

In one of the songs in Ludacris' album, Release Therapy, he says "I'd give my eyes to Stevie Wonder just to see what he seen, then I'd take em right back to see Martin Luther's dream."