Stevie Wonder

Stevland Hardaway Morris, known professionally as Stevie Wonder, born May 13, 1950, in Saginaw, Michigan, and raised in Detroit, is one of the most celebrated and beloved musicians in the history of popular music, a singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and record producer of extraordinary creative vision who has produced music of timeless beauty and social importance across seven decades while navigating the particular challenges and perceptions associated with blindness that he has confronted since infancy. Born premature, he lost his sight shortly after birth due to retinopathy of prematurity caused by excess oxygen in his hospital incubator, an experience his mother Lula Mae treated not as a disability but as a different way of experiencing the world that she encouraged him to navigate with confidence and joy. He was discovered by Ronnie White of The Miracles and signed to Motown Records at age eleven, becoming one of the label's youngest recording artists under the name Little Stevie Wonder. His first album The Jazz Soul of Little Stevie (1962) and his breakthrough live single Fingertips – Pt. 2 (1963) made him an immediate sensation. As he matured into adulthood, he renegotiated his Motown contract in 1971 at age twenty-one, gaining full creative control — a virtually unprecedented move for a Black artist at the time — and immediately embarked on a run of artistic ambition unprecedented in the history of pop music: Music of My Mind (1972), Talking Book (1972), Innervisions (1973), Fulfillingness' First Finale (1974), and Songs in the Key of Life (1976) represent a consecutive creative peak matched by almost no other artist in any era. He has won twenty-five Grammy Awards, more than any other solo male artist in history, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014.