A virtual one-man band, Wonder's use of synthesizers and other electronic musical instruments during the 1970s reshaped the conventions of R&B. He also helped drive the genre into the album era, crafting his LPs as cohesive, consistent socially conscious statements with complex compositions. Blind since shortly after his birth, Wonder was a child prodigy who signed with Motown's Tamla label at the age of 11, where he was given the professional name Little Stevie Wonder.
Early life
Wonder was born Stevland Hardaway Judkins in Saginaw, Michigan, on May 13, 1950,[7] the third of five children born to Lula Mae Hardaway, and the second of Hardaway's two children with Calvin Judkins.[8] He was born six weeks premature which, along with the oxygen-rich atmosphere in the hospital incubator, resulted in retinopathy of prematurity, a condition in which the growth of the eyes is aborted and causes the retinas to detach, so he became blind.[9][10]
When Wonder was four, his mother divorced his father and moved with her three children to Detroit, Michigan, where Wonder sang as a child in a choir at the Whitestone Baptist Church.[11] She later rekindled her relationship with her first child's father (whose surname was also coincidentally Hardaway)[8] and changed her own name back to Lula Hardaway, going on to have two more children. She later also changed Stevie's surname to Morris, partly because of relatives.[citation needed][clarification needed] Wonder has retained Morris as his legal surname. He began playing instruments at an early age, including piano, harmonica, and drums. He formed a singing partnership with a friend; calling themselves Stevie and John, they played on street corners and occasionally at parties and dances.[12]
As a child, Wonder attended Fitzgerald Elementary School in Detroit.[13] After his first album was released, The Jazz Soul of Little Stevie (1962), he enrolled in Michigan School for the Blind in Lansing, Michigan.
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