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| Birth Name(s) : Stevland Hardaway Judkins |
Date of Birth: N/A |
| Status:
Single
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Partner:
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| Profession:
Singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, record producer |
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Full Stevie Wonder Biography
Stevie Wonder (born Stevland Hardaway Judkins on May 13, 1950, name later changed to Stevland Hardaway Morris), is an American singer, songwriter, musician, and record producer. A prominent figure of 20th century popular music, Wonder has recorded more than thirty top ten hits, won twenty-two Grammy Awards (a record for a solo artist), plus one for lifetime achievement, won an Academy Award for Best Song and been inducted into both the Rock and Roll and Songwriters halls of fame. Opera star Luciano Pavarotti once referred to him in a concert as a "great, great musical genius".Blind from infancy, Wonder signed with Motown Records as a pre-adolescent at age twelve, and continues to perform and record for the label to this day. He has nine U.S. number-one hits to his name and album sales totaling more than 100 million units. Wonder has recorded several critically acclaimed albums and hit singles, and writes and produces songs for many of his labelmates and outside artists as well. A multi-instrumentalist, Wonder plays the piano, synthesizer, harmonica, congas, drums, bongos, bass guitar, organ, melodica, and clavinet. In his early career, he was best known for his harmonica work, but today he is better known for his keyboard skills.
By 1970, Wonder had scored more major hits, including "I Was Made to Love Her", "For Once in My Life", "My Cherie Amour", and "Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours". Besides being one of the first songs on which Wonder serves as both songwriter and producer, "Signed, Sealed, Delivered" is one of the main showcases for his backup group Wonderlove, a trio which included at various times Minnie Riperton, Deniece Williams, Lynda Laurence, and Syreeta Wright, whom Wonder married on September 14, 1970. Wonder and Wright divorced eighteen months later, but they continued to collaborate on musical projects. Wonder also played drums on the Jimi Hendrix cover of "I Was Made to Love Her" on the BBC Sessions album.
Wonder's critical and popular acclaim only increased less than a year later, in August 1973, when he released what is often called his best album, Innervisions. Political considerations were brought into greater focus than ever before, with the driving, percolating "Higher Ground" (#4 on the pop charts) followed by the memorable epic "Living for the City" (#8), which found Wonder more evocatively describing a time and place in American life than he would anywhere else in his career. Popular ballads such as "Golden Lady" and "All in Love Is Fair" were also present, in a mixture of moods that nevertheless held together as a unified whole. The album generated three more Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year.
On October 5, 1975, Wonder performed the historical Wonder Dream Concert in Kingston, Jamaica, a Jamaican Institute for the Blind benefit concert. Along with Wonder Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer, the three original "Wailers", performed together for the last time.
By 1975, in his 25th year, Stevie Wonder had won two consecutive Grammy Awards: in 1974 for Innervisions and in 1975 for Fulfillingness' First Finale. The following year, singer songwriter Paul Simon won the Grammy for Album of the Year for Still Crazy After All These Years. In his Grammy acceptance speech, Simon jokingly thanked Stevie Wonder for not releasing an album that year. Simon's relief was short-lived, however; in 1977 Stevie Wonder re-took the best album Grammy Award for Songs In The Key Of Life.
By 1985 Stevie Wonder was an American icon, the subject of good-humored jokes about blindness and affectionately impersonated by Eddie Murphy on Saturday Night Live. (Wonder sometimes joined in the jokes himself; in The Motown Revue Smokey Robinson presented Wonder with an award plaque, which he pretended to read for the audience – and to notice a spelling mistake.) He was in a featured duet with Bruce Springsteen on the all-star charity single for African famine relief, "We Are the World", and he was part of another charity single the following year, the AIDS-targeted "That's What Friends Are For".
In 1987 Wonder appeared on the duet Just Good Friends for Michael Jackson's Bad album. The song was performed live on one occasion in Australia when Wonder made a surprise appearance at the show.
After 1987's Characters LP, Wonder continued to release new material, but at a slower pace. He recorded a soundtrack album for Spike Lee's film Jungle Fever in 1991 with a video for "Gotta Have You", and released both Conversation Peace and the live album Natural Wonder during the same decade.
Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocal(s)(awarded to Herbie Hancock, Robert Sadin, and Wonder)
Wonder has also received an Academy Award for Best Song for "I Just Called to Say I Love You" from The Woman in Red. In 1989, Wonder was inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He is also an inductee to the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Wonder received the Polar Music Prize and Kennedy Center Honors in 1999. In 2002, he was presented with the George and Ira Gershwin Lifetime Achievement Award at UCLA's Spring Sing. He was awarded the Billboard Music Award for the Century Award in 2004, and was one the first inductees into the Michigan Walk of Fame. |
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