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MARK RIBOWSKY is the New York Times Notable author of The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal; He's a Rebel: Phil Spector--Rock and Roll's Legendary Producer; and Don't Look Back: Satchel Paige in the Shadows of Baseball. He has written for Sport magazine and Inside Sport, was a staff writer for TV Guide, and has been a semi-regular contributor to Playboy and Penthouse. Mr. Ribowsky has been a guest on Dateline NBC, Primetime Live (ABC), Connie Chung, Geraldo Rivera, The Tavis Smiley Show, and many other network and cable TV shows.

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Praise for Mark Ribowsky
 
"A dishy, insider look at Berry Gordy's making of the Supremes . . . Ribowsky nicely intersperses some hindsight reflections by the main players . . . In this engaging, vivacious account, Ribowsky energetically and thoroughly underscores the Supremes' significance as one of the first crossover successes."
--Publishers Weekly on The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal
 
"Perfect . . . The virtue of Ribowsky's book is that he brings the story down to earth without sacrificing its drama. Relying on frank and extensive interviews . . . Ribowsky spends time on details other writers have taken for granted."
--Greil Marcus on He's a Rebel: Phil Spector--Rock and Roll's Legendary Producer
 
Nobody would argue that Stevie Wonder had an easy start in life. Blinded within weeks of his premature birth, he was raised in stark poverty and abused by a brutish and alcoholic father who later abandoned the family. Through sheer talent, bold ambition, and a fierce desire for independence, he rose from the streets of Detroit to become a Motown prodigy, and from there to become, arguably, the most innovative, versatile, and influential musician, singer, and songwriter of the past fifty years. Signed, Sealed, and Delivered tells the story of Stevie Wonder in fascinating, delightful, and sometimes shocking detail. This powerful biography will have you laughing, crying, grinning, and grooving from beginning to end.

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What do you call a performer who stunned the music world at the age of twelve, who had No. 1 hit records before, during, and well after the Beatles were recording, and whose influence has helped shape everything from soul, funk, and hip-hop to disco and smooth jazz? What words do justice to a musical master whose thirty-four top-10 hits and twelve top-10 albums have won a record twenty-two Grammy Awards, and who, after a brilliant fifty-year career, continues to be one of the most dynamic and sought-after performers in the world? Only two words can describe a superstar of that caliber--Stevie Wonder.
 
Signed, Sealed, and Delivered celebrates Stevie's sixtieth birthday with a full-fledged biography of this living, breathing musical genius and legend. Author Mark Ribowsky explores the life, achievements, and influence of one of America's biggest musical icons set against the history of Motown and the last fifty years of popular music.
 
Drawing on extensive interviews with Motown producers, music executives, songwriters, and musicians, including founding Temptation Otis Williams, Mickey Stevenson, Kim Weston, surviving Funk Brother Eddie Willis, and many others, Ribowsky sorts through conflicting accounts to reveal the truth behind how Stevie found his way to Motown Records at the tender age of eleven, why the name on his first Motown contract was not the one he was born with, and how he became "Little Stevie Wonder."
 
Ribowsky digs deep into Stevie's long and often strained relationship with Motown founder and control-freak-in-chief Berry Gordy. He reveals how one of Little Stevie's running pranks would exasperate Gordy and delight fellow Motown performers. He provides detailed and fascinating accounts of Motown's inner workings and how Stevie's role there evolved from wunderkind and enfant terrible to good soldier, top star, and major creative force. He also explains what was so remarkable about Stevie's first hit single "Fingertips (Part 2)," why it took more than two years to come up with his second hit, and why Marvin Gaye was booed off the stage following a performance by Stevie.
 
You'll also discover what Stevie Wonder loved about the Beatles and what he thought they didn't do very well, how he was influenced by Bob Dylan, how Stevie's friendly rivalry with Gaye turned into an important, though indirect, alliance for both, and much more.
 
Packed with little-known facts and keen insights into Stevie Wonder's musical growth and creative process, his successful collaboration with and failed marriage to Syreeta Wright, and his long struggle with sexual addiction and suicidal depression, Signed, Sealed, and Delivered is essential reading for all Stevie Wonder fans and anyone interested in the history of Motown and the music of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s . . .

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Signed, Sealed, and Delivered

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

There is no "Hardtime, Mississippi," in Stevie Wonder's lineage, but there is a Hurtsboro, Alabama, in his blood, which is close enough. In the metaphoric sense, in fact, if Hurtsboro wasn't a real place it would be one he might well have created in a song. It might go something like, "I got Hurtsboro in my heart but it's a pain in my ass." So even though he was never actually in Hurtsboro, Hurtsboro is in him, in its rhythm and its blues and its pain. Such may help explain why a boy born with dead eyes in an urban bathtub ring called Saginaw, Michigan, could sing a song that begins with the line, "I was born in Little Rock / Had a childhood sweetheart" and make it sound so convincing, like a lick from people who sang the blues named Sonny Boy or Howlin' or Muddy and couldn't have nailed it better than Stevie Wonder when he laid down in the same song, "I got empty pockets-y'see I'm a po' man's son."

Well, that part was in fact literal, a common denominator in Saginaw and all the ensuing years in downtrodden Detroit. But the real, live hurt of being black and in a place like Little Rock or Mobile or Birmingham or Hurtsboro in the Jim Crow South could only be told secondhand to him, in sorrow and pity, by a hardy woman with the name of Lula Mae.

Hurtsboro is a blip on the map just west of the Alabama-Georgia border. Named for its founder, a land developer unfortunately named Joel Hurt, the town barely exists today; the 2000 census placed its population at not quite three hundred people, its gizzards eaten away by decades of attrition and hopelessness. At its apogee, in the 1940s, it boasted around five thousand inhabitants, few of whom had anything to boast about. One of them was Lula Mae Wright, who was born there in 1930 and grew up in that dust bowl with one general store, one school, and one Baptist church. Nearly all the townfolk were sharecroppers, cotton-pickers who were only differentiated from their slave ancestors by the few dollars they received for working fifteen hours a day under the broiling Alabama sun. The men usually died young, leaving the women to work in the fields, feed large numbers of children, and grow old and stooped in shotgun shacks on tar roads, their salvation found in God, ham and hominy, and the blues they could hear fleetingly through the static of an old burnt-tube radio.

The livin' wasn't easy, but they made do, their quiet frustrations and snubbed dreams echoing in the throaty testaments of the Alabama bluesmen, from W. C. Handy to Big Mama Thornton to Wild Child Butler. History informs us that the first blues song to be put onto a vinyl record was called "Crazy Blues," composed by Mobile native Perry Bradford. In the 1920s and 1930s, the blues rolled through the state as its practitioners rolled out of it on the way to greener pastures up north, or so they thought. Their music stayed put, the radio belching out slices of life like Cliff Gibson's "Tired of Being Mistreated," Barefoot Bill's "Snigglin' Blues," and Ed Bell's "Mean Conductor Blues."

Lula Mae could only dream of being lucky enough to ride the whistle-stop Ed Bell sang of out of Hurtsboro. Her life was a classic Deep South scramble. Her mother had been a teenager who had given her up to relatives six months after she was born, leaving her only with the surname Wright; her father, a bounder named Noble Hardaway, didn't even wait for the birth to vanish, hightailing it all the way to East Chicago, Indiana. Lula grew up believing her aunt and uncle, named Wright, were her parents. Only after they died did she learn about Noble, who in the winter of 1943 agreed to take in the daughter he never knew. Lula was put on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe headed for East Chicago.

She was thirteen then, suddenly with a new surname and a new father, and what she would recall of that journey through the barrier of time and reality was how cold her bones felt when she stepped off the train in Indiana, colder than she could even describe. It would get colder still. Noble Hardaway was by then married and raising two children in a suffocating tenement, surrounded by other southern black emigrants driven to East Chicago by the promise of a steady paycheck from the steel mills. The promise was never quite as bright as they expected; the pay was paltry, lodging cramped, frustration thick in the sooty air. Worse, Noble Hardaway was a snarling, uncouth man and a mean drunk who quit on his newly found daughter after two weeks, sending her to an aunt and her church deacon husband a few miles away to look after her. There, Lula felt some warmth for the first time in the North. Her aunt was a tolerant woman who allowed her to drop out of school to work in a textile factory. She was even permitted to hop the train periodically with her friends for the short ride to the "other" Chicago, the real one, where she once saw Count Basie's orchestra perform in a nightclub. Her aunt's only requirement was, regardless of where Lula was the night before, to be in church on Sunday morning.

Urban life was surely an education in itself. It wasn't long before her aunt caught the good deacon in a very compromising position with another woman, and when she pulled out her pistol, he bolted from bed into the street, stark naked, ducking the shots she fired at him. Fortunately, her aim was bad, but her judgment was worse; she stayed with him on his vow of probity. Lula herself was not unfamiliar with the wages of sin. An adventurous, restless girl, in 1948 she became impregnated by a man named-of all things-Paul Hardaway. The suddenly moral cheatin' deacon, unable to bear the stigma, threw her out of his home and she roamed from one friend's couch to another before gathering up enough money to move into a small flat of her own. A few weeks later, she delivered a son, whom she named Milton Hardaway despite the father not having stayed around for the birth. Taking pity on her, another relative, an uncle who lived in Saginaw, took Lula and Milton into his home.

A lumber and mining burg in decline, Saginaw sat forlornly on the bleak tundra one hundred miles to the north of Detroit, double-hammered by the "hawk," as they called the wicked winter wind, sweeping in from the Saginaw River and the huge expanse of Lake Huron fifteen miles leeward. The town was a relic of the short-lived black renaissance of the 1930s and 1940s when the overflow of the great migration from the South coalesced into a middle-class bourgeois culture, its...