Stevie Wonder made Motown $30 million before he turned 21.They gave him $1 million of it back.
He walked out, recorded four masterpieces without them,then came back and made them pay $13 million upfront just to keep him.
Two dollars and fifty cents.
That was the weekly allowance Motown Records paid Stevland Hardaway Morris after signing him at age eleven. His mother, Lula Mae Hardaway, received a monthly stipend of two hundred dollars.
The rest of everything this blind child generated for the company went into a trust fund controlled by the label, untouchable until the boy turned twenty-one.
So when that same boy picked up a phone inside Hitsville U.S.A. a few years later, dropped his voice into a perfect imitation of Berry Gordy, and told Gordy's own secretary to cut Stevie Wonder a check for fifty thousand dollars, understand that the joke carried a weight nobody in the room was ready to name.
Lula Mae Hardaway had been running from men who tried to break her since before her son was born. She came into the world in 1930 on a sharecropper's farm in Eufaula, Alabama, the daughter of Noble Hardaway, a man she would barely know.
Passed between relatives, she landed in Saginaw, Michigan, and married Calvin Judkins, a man thirty years her senior. He drank, gambled, and beat her.
When her third child, Stevland, arrived on May 13, 1950, six weeks premature, the hospital placed him in an incubator. Too much oxygen destroyed his retinas in a condition called retinopathy of prematurity, and by the time he was six weeks old, his sight was completely gone.
Calvin Judkins resented having a blind son. He offered neither money nor comfort, and the violence in the house only escalated.
In 1953, during one particularly brutal fight, Lula stabbed him. He dropped the charges, but the marriage was over.
She had been hiding money for months, tucking away whatever she could after buying food and coal. In 1954, with three small children and almost nothing else, she fled to Detroit.
The woman who would one day co-write "I Was Made to Love Her" and "Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours" spent those early Detroit years scrubbing other people's floors. Domestic work, factory shifts, anything that paid and kept her children fed.
By the time Stevland was eight, he was singing solos in the choir at Whitestone Baptist Church. He had taught himself piano and harmonica by five, drums by eight, and could identify a coin by the sound it made hitting a kitchen table.
He and a friend named John started performing together on street corners around Detroit, calling themselves Stevie and John. They played at parties and dances, two kids with nothing but rhythm and nerve.
It was this energy that caught the attention of Ronnie White, a member of the Miracles, who lived in the neighborhood. In 1961, White brought the eleven-year-old and his mother to an audition at Motown's Hitsville studio on West Grand Boulevard.
Stevland sang his own composition, a song called "Lonely Boy," and played harmonica and bongos. Berry Gordy wasn't overwhelmed by the singing, but the harmonica playing stopped him cold.
Some at the label compared the kid to Sugar Chile Robinson, the child piano prodigy who could dazzle a concert hall but never sold records. Motown's marketing chief, Barney Ales, asked the question everyone was thinking: the boy could clearly play, but would he sell?
The contract Lula Mae signed gave Motown a rolling five-year deal. Royalties went into the trust, a private tutor was provided for touring, and the company assigned producer Clarence Paul to guide the child's career.
It was Paul, or possibly Gordy himself depending on who tells the story, who gave the boy his stage name: Little Stevie Wonder. What followed was something Motown had never dealt with before.
This wasn't a polished act to be run through the label's famous charm school. This was a child, blind and restless and overflowing with joy, who turned the entire Hitsville operation into his personal playground.
He would approach people in the hallway and describe, in perfect detail, what they were wearing. Someone had tipped him off, of course, but the effect was unsettling every time.
He would sit with a book in his lap and appear to read passages aloud, reciting memorized text with the casual confidence of a sighted person scanning a page. He figured out the building's intercom system and used it like a weapon.
From wherever he happened to be, he would drop his voice into a low growl and bark orders at staff members in a dead imitation of Berry Gordy's cadence. Gordy's secretary once received a call from what she believed was her boss, instructing her to immediately prepare a fifty-thousand-dollar check for Stevie Wonder.
She came to the real Gordy to confirm. He stared at her, asked if the caller had laughed, and she admitted there had been a small laugh right before the line went dead.
Gordy told her to call Stevie and tell him his fifty thousand was on the way. When they did, the boy burst out laughing.
Gordy could have been angry, and any other executive in the music industry in 1963 would have been. But something in that prank disarmed him, because a child who could not see had learned to become anyone by sound alone and chose to use that power to make the whole building shake with laughter.
The music came in eruptions. In 1963, during a Motortown Revue show at the Regal Theater in Chicago, twelve-year-old Stevie tore through a seven-minute harmonica jam called "Fingertips" that brought the audience to its feet.
When he was called back for an encore, the replacement bass player on stage had no idea what was happening and could be heard on the recording calling out in confusion about what key they were in. "Fingertips Part 2" hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100, making Stevie the youngest solo artist ever to top the chart at thirteen years old.
The single was simultaneously number one on the R&B chart, the first time any record had done that. Then everything cooled.
His voice changed as puberty hit, and the follow-up singles stalled. Some Motown executives wanted to drop him from the roster, figuring the whole thing had been a novelty.
It took producer and songwriter Sylvia Moy to persuade Berry Gordy to give the kid another chance. Stevie enrolled at the Michigan School for the Blind in Lansing, where he studied classical piano.
When he returned, he dropped "Little" from his name. In 1965 he co-wrote "Uptight (Everything's Alright)," a song that hit number one on the R&B chart and number three on the pop chart, and the boy was back, though he was no longer a boy.
Through the rest of the 1960s, the hits kept coming: "I Was Made to Love Her" in 1967, with lyrics his mother helped write, then "For Once in My Life" in 1968, and "My Cherie Amour" in 1969.
"Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours" arrived in 1970 from the first album he produced himself, with his mother again sharing the songwriting credit and earning a Grammy nomination for it.
And through all of it, the pranks never stopped.
In 1968, he released an entire album of harmonica instrumentals under the name Eivets Rednow, his name spelled backwards, with no photograph on the cover and no mention of Stevie Wonder anywhere on the packaging. Just a tiny line of text in the corner asking, "How do you spell Stevie Wonder backwards?"
It was a prank on the entire record-buying public. It was also an eighteen-year-old artist, trapped inside a contract he hadn't chosen, quietly proving that his talent existed independent of the name Motown had given him.
Dionne Warwick learned early what it meant to be in Stevie's crosshairs. In 1961, when Stevie was just eleven, he approached her in Paris and told her with complete seriousness that she needed to stop wearing a particular red dress because he didn't like the way it looked on her.
Warwick was shaken until she discovered that the Shirelles had coached the boy on every detail of the dress they hated. It worked, and she never wore it again.
The pranks were always like that: precise, disarming, built on his ability to absorb information through sound and deploy it at exactly the right moment. He wasn't just funny, he was a strategist of joy.
But behind every joke was a boy, and then a man, who understood something about power that most people never had to learn at that age. He knew what it meant to generate millions and receive pennies, to have your name, your publishing, your creative direction, and your money controlled by someone else's signature.
On May 13, 1971, Stevie Wonder turned twenty-one. Berry Gordy threw him a birthday party at his Boston Boulevard mansion in Detroit, the kind of celebration that signaled how far both men had come from Hitsville's cramped studio.
The next morning, Gordy found a letter on his desk from a lawyer he had never heard of, disaffirming every contract Stevie had with Motown. He was stunned, writing in his autobiography that he couldn't believe Stevie hadn't warned him the night before.
Stevie fired that lawyer soon after, feeling guilty about how it had been handled. But the message was clear.
When the trust fund was finally opened, it contained roughly one million dollars. Stevie had generated an estimated thirty million for the label over the previous decade, and the boy who had been paid two dollars and fifty cents a week was now staring at the math of what his childhood had actually been worth to the people who controlled it.
He didn't sign a new deal immediately. Instead, he took his trust fund money, booked time at Jimi Hendrix's Electric Lady Studios in New York, and began recording on his own terms.
He found Malcolm Cecil and Bob Margouleff, two studio engineers who had built a massive custom synthesizer called TONTO. Over Memorial Day weekend in 1971, Stevie showed up at their studio in a pistachio-green jumpsuit, holding their album, and asked to see the machine.
Working with Cecil and Margouleff, Stevie wrote, produced, arranged, and played nearly every instrument on a string of albums that changed what popular music could be: "Music of My Mind," "Talking Book," "Innervisions," "Fulfillingness' First Finale." He became the first Black musician to win the Grammy for Album of the Year, and then won it again the following year.
When he finally sat back down with Motown to negotiate, he didn't flinch. He demanded full creative control, ownership of his publishing through his own company called Black Bull Music, and a royalty rate no artist at the label had ever received.
The contract he eventually signed in August 1975 was a seven-year, seven-album deal worth thirteen million dollars upfront, with bonuses that could push the total past thirty-seven million. He showed up to the signing party dressed in a full cowboy outfit, ten-gallon hat, leather fringe, and a gun holster with the words "Number One With A Bullet" printed across it.
Of course he did. Because Stevie Wonder never stopped being the kid who called Berry Gordy's secretary and asked for fifty thousand dollars in Berry Gordy's voice, never stopped understanding that laughter was the most dangerous weapon a person could carry because it made everyone in the room forget you were also paying attention.
Lionel Richie found this out decades later, when he went to Stevie's house to hear a new song. Stevie told him the track was on a cassette in the car and led him outside.
Richie sat in the passenger seat. Stevie got behind the wheel, put the cassette in, cranked the engine, and started reversing down the driveway.
Richie screamed. Stevie stopped the car, grinning: "Got you, didn't I?"
Richie would later tell the story on national television, saying he had spent his entire life convinced that Stevie Wonder could actually see. But that misses the point entirely.
Stevie didn't need to see. He had spent decades navigating the world through sound, through touch, through the vibrations in a room that told him exactly who was standing where and what they were feeling.
He had memorized the curve of his own driveway the way he had memorized Berry Gordy's vocal patterns at age twelve. The way he had memorized the architecture of a Moog synthesizer by running his hands across its surface.
The laughter was real. It was always real, but it was never just laughter.
It was a boy from Saginaw whose mother fled an abusive husband with hidden coins and landed in Detroit with nothing but her children and her nerve. It was a child who lost his sight before he was old enough to remember light.
It was an artist who spent a decade watching his life's work pour money into accounts he couldn't touch. And when the time came, it was a man who sat across the table from the most powerful figure in Black music and said, without blinking, this is what I want, this is how it's going to be, goodbye.
The prank was never the joke. The prank was the proof.
That a mind sharp enough to impersonate the boss at twelve was sharp enough to outmaneuver the boss at twenty-one. That the boy who couldn't see could read a room better than anyone in it.
Stevie Wonder has sold over a hundred million records. He has won twenty-five Grammy Awards, more than any other solo artist in history.
He led the campaign to make Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a federal holiday. He has been a force in the fights against apartheid, poverty, and hunger.
But before any of that, he was a blind kid in a building full of adults who controlled his money, his name, and his music. And he picked up the phone, and in a voice that wasn't his, he asked for what he was worth.
Nobody gave it to him then. So he grew up, and he took it.
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