Label head Berry Gordy was the Dumbledore figure - sufficiently intrigued to take a chance, but worried what complications might follow.Ĭomplications indeed ensued. What followed was a series of events resembling nothing so much as Harry Potter arriving at Hogwarts - the gifted wunderkind encountered skeptically by veteran wizards including Mary Wells, Smokey Robinson, and Marvin Gaye. A natural showman and sonorous vocalist, Wonder gained sufficient notoriety as a street performer that he quickly attracted the attention of executives from the local Motown juggernaut. Nevertheless, by the time his mother relocated the family to Detroit when he was 4, Wonder had already begun to develop his uncanny musical gifts for piano, harmonica, and drums. By age 30 he was largely spent as a creative force.Īrriving under hardscrabble circumstances in 1950, Wonder was born several weeks premature and blind from birth. By the 1970s, a decade he dominated with a masterful run of classic albums, Wonder had fully wed his extraordinary intuitive genius with the hard-won lessons of a calloused music business veteran. By 18 he had already experienced a full career’s worth of professional and creative triumphs and setbacks. By the time he was 12 years old, Wonder was an ascendant star and popular live draw. For those of us vested with a more normative skill set, the surpassing strangeness of this state of affairs can be difficult to grasp.

Like Mozart, Mendelssohn, Earl Scruggs, and Alex Chilton before him, Wonder composed and performed songs as a young child that inextricably transformed the contemporary landscape. Steveland “Stevie Wonder” Morris is an indisputable icon of American music, but in many ways is best understood as a part of a separate tradition - that of the musical prodigy.

Stevie wonder top 20 songs