The amaz­ing Ste­vie Won­der turns 64 today, and in hon­or of the singer’s long illus­tri­ous career, we present some of his ear­li­est moments in the spot­light. In 1963, Lit­tle Ste­vie Wonder—as he was then known—had his first num­ber one hit with a song called “Fin­ger­tips.” He was 12 years old. Not only did he top the charts, but he did so with the first ever live record­ing to hit num­ber one, and the first ever sin­gle to simul­ta­ne­ous­ly top the Bill­board Hot 100 and the R&B charts at once. See the young star per­form “Fin­ger­tips” above, fol­low­ing Mar­vin Gaye at the Motown Revue Live, and below one year lat­er on The Ed Sul­li­van Show.

“Fin­ger­tips” came from the album Record­ed Live: The 12 Year Old Genius, which was, you guessed it, record­ed live, at the Regal The­ater in Chica­go. Despite his ten­der years, this was hard­ly Lit­tle Stevie’s first rodeo. At this point, he was vir­tu­al­ly a vet­er­an of the busi­ness, hav­ing signed to Motown at age 11, toured the so-called “chitlin’ cir­cuit” and released two pre­vi­ous albums—The Jazz Soul of Lit­tle Ste­vie and Trib­ute to Uncle Ray—both of which failed to chart.

Already a mul­ti-instru­men­tal­ist, Wonder’s first big sin­gle was not a stir­ring piano bal­lad or rous­ing funk soul anthem; it was more or less an extend­ed har­mon­i­ca solo, punc­tu­at­ed by exu­ber­ant call-and-response shouts to the crowd. But peo­ple loved it, and the musi­cal prodi­gy seemed well on his way to super-star­dom. Just above, see him play anoth­er har­mon­i­ca sin­gle, “Kiss Me Baby,” in 1965 on the British music show Ready Steady Go!

Though his star seemed to be on the rise after “Fin­ger­tips,” Lit­tle Stevie’s career hit a few snags after his big break, and Berry Gordy almost dropped him from the Motown ros­ter when his voice changed. But he was not, as we know, des­tined to be a one-hit-won­der (par­don the pun). Though puber­ty cut short the child prodi­gy act, Won­der sol­diered on, drop­ping the “Lit­tle” and becom­ing a seri­ous vocal­ist. He scored hits in the mid-six­ties with the super-catchy “Uptight (Everything’s Alright)” and the beau­ti­ful “A Place in the Sun.” See him do both songs above on the Mike Dou­glass show in 1966. In-between songs, Dou­glass asks the six­teen year-old some pret­ty dopey ques­tions about his blind­ness, the result of a birth defect. Won­der responds with the same good-natured humor and grace we’ve come to expect from him. In these ear­ly appear­ances, you can plain­ly see all the qual­i­ties that have made Ste­vie Won­der so uni­ver­sal­ly beloved. The man’s still got it, as he proved in his Gram­my per­for­mance of “Get Lucky” this year with Daft Punk and Phar­rell. We wish Ste­vie the hap­pi­est of birth­days. If you’re lucky enough to be in Europe this sum­mer, do your­self a favor and catch him on one of his sev­en tour dates. He might even break out the har­mon­i­ca.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

See Ste­vie Won­der Play “Super­sti­tion” and Ban­ter with Grover on Sesame Street in 1973

Mar­vin Gaye’s Clas­sic Vocals on ‘I Heard it Through the Grapevine’: The A Cap­pel­la Ver­sion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

The great Duke Elling­ton and his long­time musi­cal part­ner Bil­ly Stray­horn per­formed such musi­cal feats of strength togeth­er over the course of near­ly three decades that they can seem to dwarf many of their con­tem­po­raries. The two co-com­posers had a knack for turn­ing pop­u­lar music—jazz, rag­time, the blues—into high art, then trans­mut­ing it right back into pop again, via three-minute blasts of swing like their most famous tune “Take the A Train.” In some respects, Elling­ton and Stray­horn’s com­po­si­tions are like that of writ­ers who har­mo­nize hip ver­nac­u­lar, pop­u­lar idiom, and The Great Tra­di­tion into works that feel thrilling­ly fresh and time­less all at once. And so it makes per­fect sense that Elling­ton and Stray­horn would com­pose a suite of songs based on scenes from William Shake­speare, that most skill­ful of lit­er­ary alchemists, and that it would turn out to be, in the words of poet and music crit­ic A.B. Spell­man, “one of the most remark­able orches­tral pieces in all of Amer­i­can music.”

That piece, Such Sweet Thun­der, found its impe­tus in Shakespeare’s most mag­i­cal play, A Mid­sum­mer Night’s Dream, notably in a line that so well cap­tures the har­mo­nious clash­ing of styles and lan­guages in both the Duke and the Bard: “I nev­er heard so musi­cal a dis­cord, such sweet thun­der.” Dan­ger­ous Minds quotes Elling­ton, who called the piece his “attempt to par­al­lel the vignettes of some of the Shake­speare­an char­ac­ters in miniature—sometimes to the point of car­i­ca­ture.” The suite of songs pre­miered at New York’s Town Hall in April, 1957, at a con­cert called “Music for Mod­erns.” Its final num­ber had yet to be writ­ten. Soon after, at the Ravinia Music Fes­ti­val out­side Chica­go, Elling­ton intro­duced the first broad­cast per­for­mance, which you can hear in full above. See below for the titles of each song and list of soloists.

1:48 Son­net For Sis­ter Kate [solo: Quentin Jack­son]
4:53 Up And Down. Up And Down [solo: Clark Ter­ry]
8:04 Star-Crossed Lovers [solo: John­ny Hodges]
12:38 Mad­ness In Great Ones [solo: Cat Ander­son]
16:25 Half The Fun [solo: John­ny Hodges]
20:42 Cir­cle Of Fourths [solo: Paul Gon­salves]
23:23 Jam With Sam [solos: Willie Cook, Paul Gon­salves, Britt Wood­man, Rus­sell Pro­cope, Cat Ander­son]

Elling­ton, the CBS radio announc­er at the begin­ning informs us, was first spurred by his atten­dance at the Strat­ford Ontario Shake­speare Fes­ti­val in 1956. But he had been a devo­tee of the­ater, and of Shake­speare, for many years. Stray­horn, it seems, was even more so. Spell­man tells us that Stray­horn “was deep into Shake­speare […] could quote whole sec­tions of plays [….], vast num­bers of son­nets from mem­o­ry, at the drop of a hat.” Immersed not only in the­ater, but in clas­si­cal music, Strayhorn’s first ambi­tion was to become a clas­si­cal com­pos­er. While the col­or bar­ri­er sti­fled that dream, his move into jazz was cer­tain­ly no com­pro­mise. Stray­horn and Elling­ton “were so attuned to one anoth­er musi­cal­ly,” writes a biog­ra­phy com­pan­ion to Ken Burn’s Jazz, “that it is now impos­si­ble to estab­lish the exact extent of the former’s con­tri­bu­tion to Ellington’s oeu­vre.” (Elling­ton called Stray­horn “my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head.”) Giv­en Strayhorn’s deep knowl­edge of Shakespeare’s work, it’s prob­a­bly fair to assume that his con­tri­bu­tion to Such Sweet Thun­der was sig­nif­i­cant. Above, see selec­tions from a 1959 per­for­mance in Switzer­land, and just below, see a 1960 avant-garde bal­let chore­o­graphed to Elling­ton and Strayhorn’s Shake­speare suite by Mau­rice Béjart, anoth­er artist with a par­tic­u­lar tal­ent for bring­ing high art themes and styles to pop­u­lar audi­ences.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Duke Ellington’s Sym­pho­ny in Black, Star­ring a 19-Year-old Bil­lie Hol­i­day

Duke Elling­ton Plays for Joan Miró in the South of France, 1966: Bassist John Lamb Looks Back on the Day

Thelo­nious Monk Plays Duke Elling­ton: Solo Piano, Berlin 1969

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.