On this day in 1977,Stevie Wonder wins a Grammy for Best Album for Songs in the Key of Lifeand also wins the Grammy for Best Male Pop Vocalist.Wonder was born Steveland Morris in Saginaw, Michigan, in 1950. An oxygen deficiency resulting from premature birth left him permanently blind. He began playing the piano when he was four. Motown Records signed him at age 10 after another Motown artist heard him play the harmonica. Adopting the stage name Stevie Wonder, he released his first hit, “Fingertips Part 2,” in 1963. His first album, Little Stevie Wonder: The 12-Year-Old Genius (1963), was a smash, as were his many subsequent albums.When Wonder turned 21, his contract expired. Motown re-signed him for $13 million, giving him complete artistic control of his work. In 1971, the accomplished producer and songwriter teamed up with his wife, Syreeta Wright, to write Where I’m Coming From. Wonder was one of the first musicians to use synthesizers and modern recording technology, allowing him to play most of the instruments himself on his recordings.
By the mid-1980s, he had 56 hit singles–27 in the Top 10, and 9 at No. 1–and 21 hit albums. He has won more than two dozen Grammies, including the Best Album award for Innervisions (1973), Songs in the Key of Life (1976), and In Square Circle (1985). In 1996, he took home three more Grammies for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance, Best Song, and Lifetime Achievement. A philanthropist, Wonder has rallied against apartheid and drunken drivers and has been active in the Retinitis Pigmentosa Foundation, as well as a host of black civil rights groups. He led the effort to establish a national holiday in honor of civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr., and he joined the fight to free Nelson Mandela and end apartheid (he was arrested in 1985 outside the South African Embassy). In the 1980s, Wonder’s voice stood out in “We Are the World,” a benefit song to end world hunger. He was the youngest artist ever to receive the Kennedy Center Honors, and he has sold more than 70 million albums. Wonder has five children, including a daughter for whom he wrote the song “Isn’t She Lovely.”
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