Stevie Wonder

Few performers have shaped American popular music more deeply than Stevie Wonder. Born Stevland Hardaway Morris in Saginaw, Michigan, and blind from infancy, he has drawn on R&B, soul, gospel, funk and jazz, and fellow musicians across those genres regard him as a pioneer. His embrace of synthesizers in the 1970s altered the grammar of contemporary R&B, and his albums of that decade treated the LP as a unified statement, with socially engaged lyrics carried by intricate arrangements.

Signed by Motown's Tamla label at eleven, he saw his single "Fingertips" reach the top of the Billboard Hot 100 at thirteen, the youngest solo artist to do so. The stretch from 1972 to 1976, termed his classic period, brought Talking Book, Innervisions and Songs in the Key of Life, and made him the first Black musician to win the Grammy for Album of the Year. The 1980s added "I Just Called to Say I Love You", collaborations with Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson, and a campaign for a federal holiday honouring Martin Luther King Jr. Sales top 100 million records, and in 2014 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.