Stevie Wonder

The Full Biography

Stevie Wonder. Musician. The Saginaw child Motown billed as Little Stevie, who took the label’s songbook and made it a conscience, a clavinet, and a life still being sung.

This is his story.

The image most people still carry is a man at a keyboard with his head thrown back, a harmonica in a rack, a grin that looks like the groove itself. The year might be 1973 and the record Innervisions, or 1976 and the double album that still feels too large for one person. What the still cannot show is a premature infant in a Saginaw hospital, a mother who moved a blind boy to Detroit, a contract signed before a voice had finished changing, a car wreck on a North Carolina road, a decade spent arguing for a holiday, and a living donor kidney the public was told about from a London stage.

He was born Stevland Hardaway Judkins on May 13, 1950, in Saginaw, Michigan, six weeks early. The hospital incubator saved him and took his sight: retinopathy of prematurity, the language of a medical file, not a metaphor. His mother was Lula Mae Hardaway. His father was Calvin Judkins. The household did not hold. Lula took the children to Detroit and the boy took, in time, the name Morris from a stepfather. Piano, harmonica, drums. A neighbor’s porch. A church. The first pressure was not fame. It was to make a sound that proved a child who could not see a room could still own it.

Ronnie White of the Miracles heard him and walked him into Motown. Berry Gordy signed him in 1961. He was eleven. The billing became Little Stevie Wonder, a stage name that treated a child as a novelty and, for a short stretch, was not entirely wrong. Clarence Paul guided him. The harmonica was already a grown instrument in a small body. On June 1, 1962, at the Regal Theater in Chicago, a live recording caught a long harmonica break and a crowd that would not sit down. Released in 1963 as “Fingertips, Pt. 2,” it went to number one on the Billboard Hot 100. He was thirteen. No one that young had sat at the top of that chart. Motown had a prodigy. The prodigy still had to become a writer.

The middle sixties were the label’s finishing school: “Uptight (Everything’s Alright),” “I Was Made to Love Her,” “For Once in My Life,” “My Cherie Amour,” “Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours.” He wrote or co-wrote more of them as the decade turned. He married the Motown singer and writer Syreeta Wright in 1970. The marriage ended in 1972; the writing partnership did not. When his first contract aged out, he did not ask for a larger allowance. He asked for the masters, the publishing, and the right to produce himself. Gordy, who had built an empire on control, gave it to him. That is the door that matters more than “Fingertips.” A child star became the author of his own records.

Music of My Mind arrived in 1972, then Talking Book the same year. The clavinet riff that opens “Superstition” is a civic object now, a sound a whole country can hum without naming the keyboard. “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” went to number one as well. He had learned the TONTO synthesizer system with Robert Margouleff and Malcolm Cecil and treated electronics as a band, not a gadget. Innervisions (1973) put the social file on the same record as the love songs: “Living for the City,” a seven-minute walk from a Mississippi bus to a New York cell; “Higher Ground”; “Don’t You Worry ’bout a Thing.” The album won Album of the Year. Three days after its release, on August 6, 1973, a car carrying him toward a concert in Durham, North Carolina, struck a logging truck. He was in a coma. He came back. The next records do not sound like a man who had decided to be careful.

Fulfillingness’ First Finale (1974) won Album of the Year again. Then, in 1976, Songs in the Key of Life, a double album with a bonus EP, as if one disc could not hold the argument. “Sir Duke,” a thank-you to Duke Ellington and the jazz that had raised him. “I Wish.” “Isn’t She Lovely,” written for his daughter Aisha. “As.” “Pastime Paradise.” “Village Ghetto Land.” Album of the Year a third time in four years. A Motown child had become the most complete American popular musician of the decade, and he had done it without leaving the label that had named him Little.

The eighties made him a global balladeer without erasing the earlier grammar. “Ebony and Ivory,” a 1982 duet with Paul McCartney, sat at number one and argued, in a melody anyone could sing, for a country that still needed the argument. “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” from the 1984 film The Woman in Red, won the Academy Award for Best Original Song and followed him for the rest of the public life the way “Moon River” followed Hepburn: a song so large it can hide the catalog behind it. “Part-Time Lover.” “That’s What Friends Are For,” with Dionne Warwick, Elton John, and Gladys Knight, a charity record that became a number one. He never pretended the radio hits were smaller than the 1970s albums. He also never pretended they were the whole file.

Just because a man lacks the use of his eyes doesn’t mean he lacks vision.Stevie Wonder

The turn is not the clavinet. The turn is the decision to spend the famous name on a holiday. From the early 1980s he campaigned for a federal birthday honoring Martin Luther King Jr.: the record “Happy Birthday,” a march on Washington in 1981, testimony, a refusal to treat the honor as a sentimental favor. Congress passed the King holiday in 1983. The first national observance was 1986. He had already been a civil-rights presence; the holiday made the presence a statute. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989. The Kennedy Center Honors came in 1999. A United Nations Messenger of Peace appointment in 2009. The Presidential Medal of Freedom, from President Barack Obama, in 2014. Twenty-five Grammy Awards, among the most for any solo artist. The hardware is real. The holiday is the civic object. He also kept showing up for other people’s records when the record needed a harmonica or a vocal that only he could place: the 1980s charity sides, the guest spots, the nights when a Motown revue still required the child who had become the author. He did not become a featured extra on his own catalog. He became, instead, the man a benefit called when the benefit wanted a conscience that could also sing.

Syreeta was the first marriage. Yolanda Simmons, then Kai Millard Morris, then Tomeeka Robyn Bracy. Children, including Aisha, whom a whole country met as a newborn on a hit record. Friends from the Hitsville years describe a professional who could hear a bad take before the engineer did. The man in the second half of the public life kept the same ear without the child billing. Both are the file. He has never made a secret of the faith that sits under the grooves. He has also never asked a congregation to confuse a clavinet with a pulpit.

The later years

He did not retire the catalog. He toured it, added to it, and used the stage as a civic room when the year required a room. A Time to Love arrived in 2005, his first studio album of new songs in a decade, with “So What the Fuss” and a title track that still sounded like a man who believed a melody could argue. He played the Obama inaugural in 2009 and the same year’s Lincoln Memorial concert, a Motown child standing where the King speech still lives in the stone. The Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, from the Library of Congress, came that year as well. He was not collecting plaques to close a shop. He was still opening one.

On a July night in 2019, in London, he stopped a concert and told the room he would have a kidney transplant in September. “I have a donor and it’s all good,” he said, which is as close as a public man comes to a medical briefing that is also a kindness. The donor was a living adult. The surgery went forward. He came back to the stage when the body allowed it, thinner in the face, the grin intact, the harmonica still a second voice. He did not make the transplant a farewell tour. He made it information, the way he had made the King holiday information: a fact the audience was trusted to hold.

The touring years that followed were a greatest-hits grammar with new talk between the songs. He has appeared at benefit stages, at award shows, at the kind of televised night when a country wants one voice that can still gather a room. He has not become a recluse and he has not become a talk-show habit. He has become, instead, a living Motown archive who still writes, still plays, and still treats a keyboard as a public square. The children are grown. Aisha’s name is still in the lyric. The Hitsville building in Detroit is a museum now. He is not. He is a man in his seventies who can sit at a piano and make a clavinet riff from 1972 feel like weather that has not passed.

What he will not do is let the child billing write the last chapter. Little Stevie is a true beginning. It is not the occupation. The occupation is the run from Talking Book through Songs in the Key of Life, the holiday, the wreck, the transplant announced from a stage, and the refusal to treat any of those as a brand refresh. He still records when the song is ready. He still shows up when a civic night needs a voice that does not flatter the room. Friends say the ear is the same. The public that only wants “I Just Called” will get that song, and then, if they stay, they will get “Living for the City,” which is the other half of the same man. Both halves are the life he is still living.

Detroit still claims the childhood. Saginaw still claims the birth certificate. Motown still claims the contract. The records claim the rest, and they do not need a narrator to finish the sentence. He has said the lack of sight is not a lack of vision. The albums are the proof. The holiday is the proof that went into law. The London announcement is the proof that he would rather tell a room the truth than let a rumor do the work. That is the whole late style. The grin is still available. The harmonica is still in the rack. The catalog is still the shop. He has spoken, in the years since the transplant, about diet and rest and the ordinary disciplines a man in his seventies accepts if he still wants a two-hour set. He has not made those disciplines a wellness brand. He has made them the price of the next night. Audiences who saw him in the 1970s say the sway is the same. Audiences who only know the Oscar ballad learn, if they stay, that the ballad was never the whole shop. Both audiences are his. He does not choose between them.

After the spotlight moved

It did not move far. It moved to whoever the next singer borrowed a clavinet from, and then it came back every June when a wedding wanted “You Are the Sunshine of My Life,” and every January when a schoolroom taught the King holiday without always naming the musician who had argued it into the calendar. Hitsville is a museum. The records are not. The children remain. The donor remains a private adult in a public story. He remains at the keyboard.

He came out of a Saginaw incubator, learned Detroit by ear, topped the chart at thirteen, took the label’s keys, made Talking Book and Songs in the Key of Life, spent the famous name on a holiday, told a London room about a kidney, and kept playing. If you only remember the grin and the riff, you have the still. If you remember Lula, the wreck, the statute, and the transplant announced as if it were another verse, you have him.

Portrait: Raph_PH · CC BY 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

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