Stevie Wonder Research Paper
Born May 13, 1950 Saginaw Michigan, was Stevie wonder. He is a very talented musician who, learned how to play common instruments. At age ten, he had mastered the piano, drums, organ, and harmonica. He is very well known for the song “Isn't she lovely” in the album “Songs in the Key of Life”, released 1976. As we all know stevie was blind, blind since birth, so did it have as much as an impact on his career as we think or not ?.
The cause of Stevie Wonder being blind was after his premature birth by a surfeit of oxygen in his incubator. Stevie Wonder's father had been abusing his mother, Which later had lead to separation. He and his five siblings were raised by his mother. At this point she moved them to Detroit, where they struggled to survive. Ever since Stevie Wonder was born he had a natural love for music. And Even though he didn't realize it, he started taking action in his career at a very young age. Stevie was also known as Steveland Morris, he played the harmonica, banged on toy drums, and sang in the church choir. Everyone knew what he was capable of but no one was prepared for his Motown audition. His mother, who was having a hard time supporting the family at the time, Could not afford to buy the things that Stevie wanted. The others soon came through, his barber for example, bought him a harmonica. At a Lion's Club party one year he received his first set of real drums, And when he was seven a neighbor who was moving gave him her piano. When producer Berry Gordy saw that Morris (Stevie Wonder), then age ten, and blind since birth, had mastered difficult instruments, he signed the young boy wonder to a contract and changed his name, he was now Little Stevie Wonder. He co wrote all of his songs, which demonstrated his wide musical range and natural instrumental ability.
Wonder became a part of the Motown Family. He spent two weeks a month touring with the other acts in the Motown As well. He continued his work in Detroit Public Schools alongside a
tutor who eventually helped get him his high school diploma from Michigan School for the Blind. Although they changed Stevies name Stevie had already made a name for himself as a musician and a singer who performed lead parts in his church choir and sang his best of rhythm-and-blues or rock-and-roll songs on his neighbors' porches. It was on one of those porches that he first got noticed, a Motown singer first heard Stevie and brought him to Berry Gordy's attention. By age nine he was singing in the choir at the Whitestone Baptist Church all by himself. At the same age he formed a duo with his bestfriend, John Glover, whose cousin was a member of the Miracles, the top group at Detroit's fledgling Motown Records. Wonder was then hanging around the Motown studios. Known as the boy wonder, he could write songs, sing, and play almost every instrument. Stevie Wonder's first record was released just after he turned twelve. In 1962 his first rhythm and blues album, The “Little Stevie Wonder; Twelve-Year-Old Genius”, was then released. “I Call It Pretty Music but the Old People Call It the Blues” did not breakthrough as a hit as the others did, due in part to some unlearned talent, but also because of his deep commitment to craft and creativity, wonder faced the difficulty of staying relevant as a musician. As Stevie grew from boy to man his voice changed, it matured into a shining terror. In 1971 wonder negotiated a new contract with motown that gave him almost total control over his records and greatly increased his royalty rate. His two follow up records also flopped, However it was still a base start. Stevie spent every free moment he had hanging around the Hitsville studios, learning to play a wide variety of instruments, sitting in on recording sessions, and even writing songs. In 1963 he was perceived as Little Stevie Wonder on a Hitsville recording of an energetic dance tune entitled fingertips Part 2. It was a smash hit, claiming the number one spot for fifteen weeks and selling over a million copies. Fingertips took a child prodigy and launched him on a career path to pop fame and superstardom. He enjoyed an integrated audience during the 1960s, and the Rolling Stones were his opening act in 1964. Wonder's contributions to the Motown hit factory during his teens included the standards uptight (1966), I was made to Love Her (1967), For once in my Life (1968), and My Cherie Amour (1969). His career was beginning to take off. And it was not taking very long either. Wright had been saying that Wonder's music was her chief competition. "He would wake up and go straight to the keyboard," she recalled to Smith of the New Yorker. On May 13, 1971, Wonder turned twenty-one and immediately took charge of his finances and his career, breaking with Motown and eventually establishing his own studio, production company, and publishing house. It was a decision he felt he had to make in order to record and produce his kind of music.
Wonder entered a period of tremendous personal and professional growth. He invested much of his fortune in new synthesizers and devoted himself to recording at Electric Lady Studios, designed by fellow sonic explorer Jimi Hendrix. Shocked that Wonder would consider abandoning the Motown family, Gordy negotiated a new contract that gave the artist unprecedented artistic freedom, including his own music publishing company. Already thoroughly skilled in the recording and producing process by virtue of his years at Motown, he set out to familiarize himself with the legal and financial aspects of the music business. In 1971 Wonder turned 21, it was time he was granted the money he had earned as a minor. But Motown didn't pay what Stevie expected, they only paid him $1 million out of the $30 million he had earned during the time period. After significant legal battle, he managed to acquire a substantial degree of artistic and financial autonomy. "At 21, Stevie was interested in being treated well and in controlling his life and in presenting his music, and all those things were extraordinary things for a young man to ask at that point," announced Johanan Vigoda, the longtime attorney of Stevie, to Smith of the New Yorker. Motown's considerable clout could not top the exposure Wonder received during the summer of 1972, when he accompanied the Rolling Stones on tour and gained nationwide exposure for the new Stevie Wonder sound, which was a huge success. Wonder has committed himself to fostering greater understanding, love, and respect between people of different races and different social and economic classes. He was very active in efforts to have Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday established as a national holiday, and he has also lent his support to world hunger relief, AIDS research, the anti-apartheid movement, and drunk-driving education. His legendary perfectionism has resulted in some carefully crafted albums that feature stirring social commentary as well as easy-going love songs. Wonder records albums less frequently than he did before his accident, partly because his causes often take him away from the studio, but also because he prefers to mull over a song for a very long time before he feels ready to record it. he continues to pursue his highly spiritual and utopian vision of international racial and cultural harmony. "Neither this country nor the world will be right until people begin to accept people as being people and not let their insecurities determine the future of this society, this country, this world," he told a reporter for Jet magazine. "Sometimes, I feel I am really blessed to be blind because I probably would not last a minute if I were able to see things. God knew what he was doing." Wonder has refused to consider his blindness as a handicap. He strives to be as independent as possible, making use of high-tech electronics such as a reading machine that scans printed material and translates it into spoken words, a computer that enables him to produce braille printouts of information he has keyed in, and even a tennis ball that beeps so that he knows where to swing his racket. He is still hopeful that someday a technological or medical breakthrough will allow him to see. What Stevie Wonder brought to the table, with the establishment of his publishing company, his own music, and almost full creative freedom, was an increasingly impressive body of work that managed to charge the high spirits of classic soul, his own introspective and increasingly politicized lyrical sensibility. From a sonic standpoint, too, he was a trailblazer, demonstrating the versatility of the synthesizer when it was still something of a novelty instrument in the R&B world. Wonder's career was almost destroyed permanently by a automobile accident in 1973 that nearly claimed his life and left him with deep facial scars. If anything, however, this event pushed stevie to double his amount of effort. Virtually all of Wonder's work during the early to mid-1970s is essential pop. After the accident Stevie was Producing really good music and it was starting to burn up the charts. Wonder's wife, Wright, co wrote all of the songs on the earlier album, Where I'm Coming From, including the number-eight hit "If You Really Love Me," which features Wright prominently on background vocals. The two divorced in 1972 but remained friends, and they continued to collaborate over the years. Wright told Giles Smith of the New Yorker in 1995 that music was always her chief rival in the marriage. "He would wake up and go straight to the keyboard. I knew and understood that his passion was music. That was really his No. 1 wife." Wonder's 1972 summer tour of the United States introduced his music to a huge white audience and helped to make hits.The ambitious, double-sided Songs in the Key of Life was the first album by an American artist to debut at number one on the Billboard charts; it stayed there for 14 weeks. Like Innervisions and Fulfillingness' First Finale, it won the Grammy Award for the best album of the year. In 1975, when Paul Simon was awarded the Grammy for best album for Still Crazy after All These Years, he began his acceptance speech by thanking Wonder for not having made a record that year. The Gershwin honor was just one of many Wonder has received over his long, illustrious career. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1983, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989, and the Apollo Theater Hall of Fame in 2011. In 1996 he won a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and in 2010 was made a Commander of the Arts and Letters by French Culture Minister Frédéric Mitterrand. Wonder was honored by BET for his contribution to African American life in 2012. Wonder still performs at big events, and most recently he has been seen at the funerals of his contemporaries, such as Whitney Houston, Don Cornelius, and Michael Jackson. Wonder returned in the old spirit with the platinum-selling Hotter Than July (1980), which yielded the number-five hit "Master Blaster (Jammin')," as well as "Happy Birthday," a tribute song that was a key element in Wonder's hard-fought campaign to make the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday. Wonder sang the song and joined other celebrities in advocating for the King Holiday Bill at a Washington, DC, rally attended by more than 100,000 people on January 15, 1981, the anniversary of King's birth. With Wonder's financial backing, a lobbying office was opened in Washington that secured millions of signatures in support of the bill. Wonder lent his talents to another charity single, the Dionne Warwick collaboration "That's What Friends Are For," which also featured Elton John and Gladys Knight.
The cause of Stevie Wonder being blind was after his premature birth by a surfeit of oxygen in his incubator. Stevie Wonder's father had been abusing his mother, Which later had lead to separation. He and his five siblings were raised by his mother. At this point she moved them to Detroit, where they struggled to survive. Ever since Stevie Wonder was born he had a natural love for music. And Even though he didn't realize it, he started taking action in his career at a very young age. Stevie was also known as Steveland Morris, he played the harmonica, banged on toy drums, and sang in the church choir. Everyone knew what he was capable of but no one was prepared for his Motown audition. His mother, who was having a hard time supporting the family at the time, Could not afford to buy the things that Stevie wanted. The others soon came through, his barber for example, bought him a harmonica. At a Lion's Club party one year he received his first set of real drums, And when he was seven a neighbor who was moving gave him her piano. When producer Berry Gordy saw that Morris (Stevie Wonder), then age ten, and blind since birth, had mastered difficult instruments, he signed the young boy wonder to a contract and changed his name, he was now Little Stevie Wonder. He co wrote all of his songs, which demonstrated his wide musical range and natural instrumental ability.
Wonder became a part of the Motown Family. He spent two weeks a month touring with the other acts in the Motown As well. He continued his work in Detroit Public Schools alongside a
tutor who eventually helped get him his high school diploma from Michigan School for the Blind. Although they changed Stevies name Stevie had already made a name for himself as a musician and a singer who performed lead parts in his church choir and sang his best of rhythm-and-blues or rock-and-roll songs on his neighbors' porches. It was on one of those porches that he first got noticed, a Motown singer first heard Stevie and brought him to Berry Gordy's attention. By age nine he was singing in the choir at the Whitestone Baptist Church all by himself. At the same age he formed a duo with his bestfriend, John Glover, whose cousin was a member of the Miracles, the top group at Detroit's fledgling Motown Records. Wonder was then hanging around the Motown studios. Known as the boy wonder, he could write songs, sing, and play almost every instrument. Stevie Wonder's first record was released just after he turned twelve. In 1962 his first rhythm and blues album, The “Little Stevie Wonder; Twelve-Year-Old Genius”, was then released. “I Call It Pretty Music but the Old People Call It the Blues” did not breakthrough as a hit as the others did, due in part to some unlearned talent, but also because of his deep commitment to craft and creativity, wonder faced the difficulty of staying relevant as a musician. As Stevie grew from boy to man his voice changed, it matured into a shining terror. In 1971 wonder negotiated a new contract with motown that gave him almost total control over his records and greatly increased his royalty rate. His two follow up records also flopped, However it was still a base start. Stevie spent every free moment he had hanging around the Hitsville studios, learning to play a wide variety of instruments, sitting in on recording sessions, and even writing songs. In 1963 he was perceived as Little Stevie Wonder on a Hitsville recording of an energetic dance tune entitled fingertips Part 2. It was a smash hit, claiming the number one spot for fifteen weeks and selling over a million copies. Fingertips took a child prodigy and launched him on a career path to pop fame and superstardom. He enjoyed an integrated audience during the 1960s, and the Rolling Stones were his opening act in 1964. Wonder's contributions to the Motown hit factory during his teens included the standards uptight (1966), I was made to Love Her (1967), For once in my Life (1968), and My Cherie Amour (1969). His career was beginning to take off. And it was not taking very long either. Wright had been saying that Wonder's music was her chief competition. "He would wake up and go straight to the keyboard," she recalled to Smith of the New Yorker. On May 13, 1971, Wonder turned twenty-one and immediately took charge of his finances and his career, breaking with Motown and eventually establishing his own studio, production company, and publishing house. It was a decision he felt he had to make in order to record and produce his kind of music.
Wonder entered a period of tremendous personal and professional growth. He invested much of his fortune in new synthesizers and devoted himself to recording at Electric Lady Studios, designed by fellow sonic explorer Jimi Hendrix. Shocked that Wonder would consider abandoning the Motown family, Gordy negotiated a new contract that gave the artist unprecedented artistic freedom, including his own music publishing company. Already thoroughly skilled in the recording and producing process by virtue of his years at Motown, he set out to familiarize himself with the legal and financial aspects of the music business. In 1971 Wonder turned 21, it was time he was granted the money he had earned as a minor. But Motown didn't pay what Stevie expected, they only paid him $1 million out of the $30 million he had earned during the time period. After significant legal battle, he managed to acquire a substantial degree of artistic and financial autonomy. "At 21, Stevie was interested in being treated well and in controlling his life and in presenting his music, and all those things were extraordinary things for a young man to ask at that point," announced Johanan Vigoda, the longtime attorney of Stevie, to Smith of the New Yorker. Motown's considerable clout could not top the exposure Wonder received during the summer of 1972, when he accompanied the Rolling Stones on tour and gained nationwide exposure for the new Stevie Wonder sound, which was a huge success. Wonder has committed himself to fostering greater understanding, love, and respect between people of different races and different social and economic classes. He was very active in efforts to have Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday established as a national holiday, and he has also lent his support to world hunger relief, AIDS research, the anti-apartheid movement, and drunk-driving education. His legendary perfectionism has resulted in some carefully crafted albums that feature stirring social commentary as well as easy-going love songs. Wonder records albums less frequently than he did before his accident, partly because his causes often take him away from the studio, but also because he prefers to mull over a song for a very long time before he feels ready to record it. he continues to pursue his highly spiritual and utopian vision of international racial and cultural harmony. "Neither this country nor the world will be right until people begin to accept people as being people and not let their insecurities determine the future of this society, this country, this world," he told a reporter for Jet magazine. "Sometimes, I feel I am really blessed to be blind because I probably would not last a minute if I were able to see things. God knew what he was doing." Wonder has refused to consider his blindness as a handicap. He strives to be as independent as possible, making use of high-tech electronics such as a reading machine that scans printed material and translates it into spoken words, a computer that enables him to produce braille printouts of information he has keyed in, and even a tennis ball that beeps so that he knows where to swing his racket. He is still hopeful that someday a technological or medical breakthrough will allow him to see. What Stevie Wonder brought to the table, with the establishment of his publishing company, his own music, and almost full creative freedom, was an increasingly impressive body of work that managed to charge the high spirits of classic soul, his own introspective and increasingly politicized lyrical sensibility. From a sonic standpoint, too, he was a trailblazer, demonstrating the versatility of the synthesizer when it was still something of a novelty instrument in the R&B world. Wonder's career was almost destroyed permanently by a automobile accident in 1973 that nearly claimed his life and left him with deep facial scars. If anything, however, this event pushed stevie to double his amount of effort. Virtually all of Wonder's work during the early to mid-1970s is essential pop. After the accident Stevie was Producing really good music and it was starting to burn up the charts. Wonder's wife, Wright, co wrote all of the songs on the earlier album, Where I'm Coming From, including the number-eight hit "If You Really Love Me," which features Wright prominently on background vocals. The two divorced in 1972 but remained friends, and they continued to collaborate over the years. Wright told Giles Smith of the New Yorker in 1995 that music was always her chief rival in the marriage. "He would wake up and go straight to the keyboard. I knew and understood that his passion was music. That was really his No. 1 wife." Wonder's 1972 summer tour of the United States introduced his music to a huge white audience and helped to make hits.The ambitious, double-sided Songs in the Key of Life was the first album by an American artist to debut at number one on the Billboard charts; it stayed there for 14 weeks. Like Innervisions and Fulfillingness' First Finale, it won the Grammy Award for the best album of the year. In 1975, when Paul Simon was awarded the Grammy for best album for Still Crazy after All These Years, he began his acceptance speech by thanking Wonder for not having made a record that year. The Gershwin honor was just one of many Wonder has received over his long, illustrious career. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1983, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989, and the Apollo Theater Hall of Fame in 2011. In 1996 he won a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and in 2010 was made a Commander of the Arts and Letters by French Culture Minister Frédéric Mitterrand. Wonder was honored by BET for his contribution to African American life in 2012. Wonder still performs at big events, and most recently he has been seen at the funerals of his contemporaries, such as Whitney Houston, Don Cornelius, and Michael Jackson. Wonder returned in the old spirit with the platinum-selling Hotter Than July (1980), which yielded the number-five hit "Master Blaster (Jammin')," as well as "Happy Birthday," a tribute song that was a key element in Wonder's hard-fought campaign to make the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday. Wonder sang the song and joined other celebrities in advocating for the King Holiday Bill at a Washington, DC, rally attended by more than 100,000 people on January 15, 1981, the anniversary of King's birth. With Wonder's financial backing, a lobbying office was opened in Washington that secured millions of signatures in support of the bill. Wonder lent his talents to another charity single, the Dionne Warwick collaboration "That's What Friends Are For," which also featured Elton John and Gladys Knight.