I was at a famous restaurant in New York City (Harlem) last night (May 12, 2011) called RED ROOSTER and later into the dining experience I heard this song. It was so perfect to hear at the time. Stevie Wonder is a 'wonder' and a classic musical artist.
Stevie Wonder was born in Saginaw, Michigan in 1950, being the third of six children to Calvin Judkins and Lula Mae Hardaway. Owing to his being born six weeks premature, the blood vessels at the back of his eyes had not yet reached the front and their aborted growth caused the retinas to detach.[3] The medical term for this condition is retinopathy of prematurity, or ROP, and while it may have been exacerbated by the oxygen pumped into his incubator, this was not the primary cause of his blindness.
On August 6, 1973, Wonder was in a serious automobile accident while on tour in North Carolina, when a car in which he was riding rear-ended a flatbed truck, sliding under the back of the truck and causing the bed of the truck to crash through the car's windshield, striking Wonder in the head. This left him in a coma for four days and resulted in a partial loss of his sense of smell and a temporary loss of sense of taste.
Despite the setback, Wonder recovered all of his musical faculties, and re-appeared in concert at Madison Square Garden in March 1974 with a performance that highlighted both up-tempo material and long, building improvisations on mid-tempo songs such as "Living for the City".
Wonder's songs are renowned for being quite difficult to sing. He has a very developed sense of harmony and uses many extended chords utilizing extensions such as 9ths, 11ths, 13ths, b5s, etc. in his compositions. Many of his melodies make abrupt, unpredictable changes. Many of his vocal melodies are also melismatic, meaning that a syllable is sung over several notes. Some of his best known and most frequently covered songs are played in keys which are more often found in jazz than in pop and rock.
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