Signed, Sealed, and Delivered : The Soulful Journey of Stevie Wonder

This is the first definitive biography of Stevie Wonder; it covers his incredible fifty-year career and sets it against the history of Motown and the last half century of popular music, showing his influence in shaping music throughout his career and still today, particularly in laying the groundwork for the evolution of hip-hop and rap.The 60s can be called his development era, from infectious kid-soul-pop to ever-maturing themes guided by Motown's mainstream maestros. Then, freed to make the music that drove his sensibilities, came his period of massive innovation and peak influence from the early 70s through the end of the decade, which saw "innervision" and his other masterpieces. The next decade was a jumble of personal and musical confusion, uncertainty, and crass commercialism; and the mid-90s to now his renaissance toward a "second coming" with his 60th birthday in 2010.His music spans a great deal of territory: it mutates from the R&B of "Fingertips" to smooth pop sound to gradually increasing social themes -- when he sang of "hardtown, Mississippi" and having the "empty pockets" of a "a poor man's son it moved Motown away from love songs and into the meridians of inner-city blues that Marvin Gaye would plumb as a result of Stevie's early forays, and which Stevie would explode into vapors of psychedelia, funk, free-form jazz-metal fusion, and long album-oriented, semi-autobiographical novellas of personal agonies.

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.