Unfortunately, it wasn’t a presentiment of further immediate success and after an album of mostly covers “With A Song in My Heart” flopped he dropped the ‘little’ from his name and set about writing his way into music history. His early records were fairly inauspicious but in August 1963 he had a sudden double success in the US when a single, ‘Fingertips Pt.2’, and a boldly-titled album, The 12-Year-Old Genius (Recorded Live), both reached No. As early as 11 years of age his talent came to the notice of Ronnie White of The Miracles who alerted Berry Gordy at Motown and Gordy duly signed him and renamed him Little Stevie Wonder. Brought up in Detroit he learned to play a variety of instruments as a child as well as sing in the church choir. Stevie Wonder is not just a huge figure in music he is one of the 20 th century’s most consistently brilliant artists.īorn in Saginaw, Michigan, Wonder was blind shortly after birth. By 1973 he was the most experimental and ambitious black artist working in pop music and had extended the boundaries of that genre through his unique fusions of soul, jazz and rock, all the while writing material of a social and political nature, alongside songs of the heart. When Stevie Wonder released his landmark album, Innervisions, 40 years ago, in August 1973, he had already made 15 albums and had a decade of chart success both in the UK and the US. From his beginnings as Little Stevie, before he was even a teenager, to his groundbreaking 1970s albums that took black music into a whole new direction, allowing so many that followed him to break out of the strictures of what record companies considered ‘soul music.’ Few artists have had such a diverse and far-reaching impact on music as Stevie Wonder.
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