Stevie Wonder – Keys, sunshine and conscience

Motown signing, TONTO sessions, and a holiday campaign

Stevland Hardaway Judkins was born on May 13, 1950, in Saginaw, Michigan, six weeks premature. The incubator oxygen damaged his optic nerves; he was blind from shortly after birth. His family moved to Detroit, where he grew up in the Black Bottom neighborhood and began teaching himself harmonica, piano and drums, on his own, while he was still a child. He was signed to Motown’s Tamla subsidiary at age eleven after being brought to the label’s attention by Ronnie White of the Miracles. His first number one single, “Fingertips (Part 2),” was a live recording made at a Chicago revue in 1963, when he was twelve.

The early Motown records established him as a commercial property while keeping him inside the label’s production system. “Uptight (Everything’s Alright)” (1965), “I Was Made to Love Her” (1967), “For Once in My Life” (1968), and “My Cherie Amour” (1969) were produced by the label’s in-house team. Wonder played harmonica and co-wrote, but the arrangements, production decisions, and release schedules belonged to Motown. Motown kept the release schedule and treated him as a commercial act.

When he turned twenty-one in 1972, he renegotiated his contract entirely, taking creative and financial control unprecedented for a Motown act. He traveled to New York and worked with Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff and their TONTO (The Original New Timbral Orchestra), an enormous custom modular synthesizer built over years in a loft on 38th Street. TONTO could generate sounds that no other commercial instrument could produce: bass simulations, string approximations, percussion textures that had no acoustic equivalent. Wonder recorded himself playing most parts, building tracks from the bottom up.

Talking Book (1972), Innervisions (1973), Fulfillingness’ First Finale (1974), and Songs in the Key of Life (1976) represent one of the most sustained creative periods in American popular music. These four albums, completed in four years, cover political speech, romantic love, spiritual inquiry, jazz-influenced chord movement, and synthesizer invention simultaneously. The playing under those songs is what carries that spread of subjects on the four albums.

“Living for the City” on Innervisions depicted a young Black man arriving in New York and immediately being arrested, narrated in a dramatic spoken-word sequence that stopped the music midway through. “Higher Ground” opened with a clavinet riff that became one of the most copied rhythmic patterns in rock, later anchoring Red Hot Chili Peppers’ cover. “Superstition” was originally written for Jeff Beck but Wonder kept it; it went to number one on both the pop and R&B charts simultaneously.

Songs in the Key of Life was a double album with an additional EP, totaling twenty-one tracks. “Sir Duke” celebrated Duke Ellington; “Isn’t She Lovely” was recorded at the birth of his daughter Aisha; “Pastime Paradise” was later sampled by Coolio for “Gangsta’s Paradise.” The album won Album of the Year at the Grammy Awards in 1977 It is the Album of the Year prize for that double album, the extra EP and the twenty-one tracks issued together.

The political lines sit inside the songs, in the same arrangements as the other tracks. Wonder lobbied the United States Congress for fifteen years to establish Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday as a national holiday, beginning in 1981; the holiday was signed into law in 1983. “Happy Birthday” was written explicitly for the campaign. He also organized the “Rally Against Racial Violence” in 1982 in Washington D.C., following it with the “I Just Called to Say I Love You” period which was a very large seller, and a step away from the albums of 1972 to 1976.

Innervisions is the tightest single album of that run. Songs in the Key of Life holds the full track list. Talking Book opens the TONTO years. “Superstition,” “Living for the City,” and “Sir Duke” are the three tracks that demonstrate the range in sequence. Compared with Marvin Gaye: more instrumentally accomplished, more harmonically complex, less erotic directness. Compared with Ray Charles: different synthesis model, less blues-dominant, more explicitly political. Those albums put jazz harmony, synthesizer parts and direct political speech on the same records, beside the love songs and the spiritual tracks.

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