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(Credits: Far Out / Jac. de Nijs / National Archives)
In terms of possessing the greatest natural musical ability, there aren’t many more talented individuals to have ever graced the world of popular music than Stevie Wonder.
Bursting onto the scene before he was even a teenager, charting with ‘Fingertips, Parts 1 & 2’ at the age of 12, ‘Little’ Stevie showcased in his teenage years that not only was he a prodigious instrumentalist, playing virtually everything on record from harmonica to keyboards, but a sublime vocalist, who seemingly had the ability to create melodies from nothing.
He would continue his longstanding relationship with Motown, releasing several classic albums throughout the 1970s and ‘80s that proved he wasn’t just a master of pop craftsmanship, but had the depth of talent to create more ambitious works that transcended the world of soul with which he had been brought up.
While there’s no denying the brilliance and scope of records like Songs in the Key of Life or Innervisions, but despite taking pop and soul in a more progressive direction, he wouldn’t have even got his start without the wealth of influence that he gained from other soul artists who were active in the 1950s and early ‘60s.
It would be difficult to pick out any particular artist who provided Wonder with the greatest amount of influence, considering how original his own work turned out to be, but there are shades of a number of other singers, including Smokey Robinson, Ray Charles, and the King of Soul himself, Sam Cooke.
It’s Cooke that Wonder seemingly looks up to most, and he has heaped praise upon the vocalist in several interviews for the way that he delivered his songs with the utmost passion and melodic intuition, and during a 2005 conversation with journalist Barney Hoskyns, Wonder revealed that there was something particularly special about Cooke that few others were able to demonstrate.
“I remember hearing an album by Sam Cooke,” Wonder proclaimed, recalling the first time he was ever exposed to the music of his idol. He then went on to describe where he believed Cooke’s melodies came from, and rather than it being a simple case of possessing great musical aptitude, his ponderings were of a far more spiritually-minded approach.
“I think melodies are like angels from heaven,” Wonder continued, “Expressing a place for the heart to follow. I think the voice has a lot to do with your spirit, and if the spirit feels right, the voice will stay pretty consistently the same from that point of maturity.”
While melody is clearly not a heaven-sent or divine aspect of music, it’s true that a well-crafted melody can make the listener feel as though they’ve ascended to a higher plain, and when made with as much love and care as possible, one might think that they’ve come from an unexplainable place beyond human comprehension.
Sometimes, a melody can seem so simple to one songwriter, yet its source is so bewildering to another, and for Wonder, hearing the music of Cooke was evidently a prime example of an artist who had the ability to write melodies that impressed him to the point of speechlessness.
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