📍Detroit, Michigan, USA
1954 – 1971“Stevland Morris was born six weeks premature in Saginaw, Michigan, in 1950, and the oxygen he received in an incubator led to his blindness. In 1953 his mother, Lula, moved the family to Detroit, into a flat on Hastings Street in the Brewster-Douglass housing projects. It was a crowded, lively, working-class neighbourhood, and the boy who could not see it learned it through sound: radios through open windows, church singing, street games and traffic. Music arrived through the community around him. He was given a toy harmonica, bongos and a toy piano, and a barber on the block gave him a real Hohner harmonica. He played harmonica by five, took up piano at six and drums at eight, sang in his church choir, and became something of a neighbourhood sensation, performing on street corners and porches with friends. His mother worried about him constantly but also let him explore, and he learned to find his own way around the neighbourhood. In 1961, at eleven, he sang his own song, Lonely Boy, for Ronnie White of the Miracles, whose younger brother Gerald was one of his friends. White took him to Motown, a few miles away, where Berry Gordy signed him to Tamla and renamed him Little Stevie Wonder. Two years later Fingertips topped the charts. He studied at the Michigan School for the Blind while recording, and went on to Songs in the Key of Life and decades of hits. The joy, social conscience and love of community in his music grew from the Detroit streets that first welcomed his talent.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today