Stevie Wonder

In 1971, Wonder haunted the studio next door while Marvin Gaye built What's Going On. "Marvin was his teacher," said Steve McKeever, a former Motown executive. "He was in the studio when Marvin was making that record ... he got that lesson right there at the foot of it." Two years later, using the creative control Gaye had modeled, Wonder won the fight that opened his own classic run. At Gaye's funeral in 1984, he named the debt outright: "Marvin was the person who encouraged me that the music I had within me, I must feel free to let come out."

listen: upstream & heresource: Grunge — How Marvin Gaye's Mentorship Gave Stevie Wonder the Springboard for His Career (Marvin Gaye influence, funeral quote) ↗share

1971

What's Going OnMarvin Gaye

→↓

1973

Higher GroundStevie Wonder

listen forPlay What's Going On against Higher Ground and neither song resolves the way soul singles usually do — Gaye's strings hang in tension over a bassline that keeps circling instead of landing, and Wonder answers with a clavinet riff looping in a minor key under lyrics about karma catching up with you. Both are dance tracks that refuse to let the groove numb the message; that trick — urgency riding a beat instead of fighting it — is the lesson Gaye modeled first and Wonder made permanently his own.

Ray Charles was blind too, and Berry Gordy built an album on the resemblance: at eleven, Wonder cut Tribute to Uncle Ray, a full record of Charles covers, before he had released a song under his own name. Decades later, addressing Charles's legacy directly, Wonder still spoke like the kid who had chased that voice across a Detroit radio dial: "long before I knew we had so much in common, I knew him as a man and a voice that touched my heart," he said. "His voice made me feel like I wanted to love deeper, to care more and reach out and touch the world."

listen: upstream & heresource: EURweb — Stevie Wonder and Clint Eastwood Reflect on the Legacy of Ray Charles (Ray Charles influence, tribute quote) ↗share

1956

Drown in My Own TearsRay Charles

→↓

1962

Drown in My Own TearsStevie Wonder

listen forSet Charles's original Drown in My Own Tears against Wonder's cover from Tribute to Uncle Ray and the debt is unmissable — eleven-year-old Wonder doesn't reinterpret the phrasing so much as inhabit it, bending the same words down into the same weary blues moan Charles built the arrangement around. It is the sound of a kid studying a master's voice like a script, note for note, before he had found his own.

Wonder has pointed to one specific memory of falling for a Sam Cooke record: "I remember hearing an album by Sam Cooke," he told the interview series Blank on Blank in 2005, before singing a line to test the words — "I think melodies are like, you know, angels from heaven expressing a place for the heart to follow." It is an odd way to describe a songwriting philosophy, but it names exactly what Cooke gave him: the idea that a melody could carry real spiritual weight without ever raising its voice, and that gospel phrasing could survive the move into pop without losing its gravity.

listen: upstream & heresource: Blank on Blank — Stevie Wonder on Keys of Life (Sam Cooke influence, 2005 interview) ↗share

1964

A Change Is Gonna ComeSam Cooke

→↓

1976

If It's MagicStevie Wonder

listen forSet A Change Is Gonna Come next to If It's Magic and the kinship is in the restraint — Cooke's voice rides over strings that swell without ever crowding him, letting one held, unresolved note carry the whole ache of the lyric; Wonder does something close to identical over harp and electric piano, stretching the word "magic" until it sounds like a question rather than a promise. Neither song raises its volume to make its point.