May 13, 2010. Copyright 2010, Graphic News. All rights reserved

Child prodigy who became a President’s favourite, musician Stevie Wonder turns 60
By Susan Shepherd

LONDON, May 13, Graphic News:  This summer, Stevie Wonder will close Glastonbury, one of the world’s foremost rock festivals, deep in the English countryside. It will mark the end of 12 months in which the singer-songwriter -- born 60 years ago in poverty, in Saginaw, Michigan -- will have performed at the memorial service of his friend and fellow Motown child star, Michael Jackson, been made a United Nations Messenger of Peace by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, helped raise millions of dollars in a telethon for earthquake-hit Haiti and received France’s highest honour for Arts and Literature, the Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres. Stevie Wonder at 60 is, officially, what he has been for decades: an ambassador for black music, for civil rights, and for peace. “Just because a man lacks the use of his eyes,” he once said, “doesn’t mean he lacks vision.”

As Barack Obama observed, answering a question about his musical hero during the 2008 election campaign, Wonder produced a singularly masterful series of albums in the 1970s, starting with “Music of My Mind” in the spring of 1972, followed later the same year by “Talking Book”. Then came “Innervisions” (1973), “Fulfillingness’ First Finale” (1974) and “Songs in the Key of Life” (1976), a body of work on which, despite later commercial hits and even an Oscar in 1984, his career largely rests. As the then president-elect put it: “Those are as brilliant a set of five albums as we’ve ever seen.” In all, 14 of the 25 Grammy Awards Wonder has picked up in his career are associated with this period, acknowledging singles such as “Superstition”, “You are the Sunshine of My Life”, “Living for the City” (which he memorably performed as a duet, in concert with Ray Charles shortly before Charles’ death in 2004), and “I Wish”. A single from earlier times, “Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I’m Yours”, when Wonder was still a one-man hit factory for Berry Gordy’s Tamla Motown label, became an anthem of the Obama journey to the White House.

Nicknamed Little Stevie Wonder by the record company, on account of his youthful genius, the boy born Stevland Hardaway Judkins remains the youngest person, at 13, ever to have had a number one record in the U.S. charts. Blind from premature birth, he was given a harmonica and a toy drum kit one Christmas and, growing up in Detroit, sang along to the radio. At 10, he was introduced to a Motown talent scout by a member of Smokey Robinson’s Miracles and signed his first contract at 12. At 16, in the wake of a break-up with a girlfriend, he wrote “My Cherie Amour”. It took him 30 minutes. He went on to pen hits for Marvin Gaye, The Four Tops and his first wife, Syreeta Wright, whom he married when he was 20. In May 1971, on his 21st birthday, his contract with Motown expired, leaving Wonder free to follow his own creative path. He narrowly survived a car crash en route to a concert in North Carolina in 1973, a crisis he later said deepened his sense of destiny. After his marriage to Syreeta ended, Wonder went on to have two children with Yolanda Simmons, the first of whom -- a girl named Aisha -- is celebrated in the song, “Isn’t She Lovely?” The eldest of his seven offspring, Aisha also became a singer and appears on her father’s 2005 album, “A Time 2 Love”.

In 1986, after years of petitioning by Wonder and others, President Ronald Reagan created Martin Luther King Day, to commemorate, formally, the life of the assassinated black campaigner.
/ENDS