He was 11 years old when Berry Gordy signed him to Motown, a blind kid from Saginaw who could play drums, piano, and harmonica better than the session musicians twice his age. They called him Little Stevie Wonder and put him on the chitlin circuit, a child prodigy who could imitate Ray Charles and James Brown with unsettling accuracy. The hits came: Fingertips (Part 2) was recorded live when Stevie was 12, and it went to number one. He was a novelty act, and Motown was content to keep him that way. Stevie Wonder was not content. At 21 he renegotiated his contract and demanded complete creative control -- which, at Motown in 1971, was like telling the pope you'd be rewriting the Bible. Gordy blinked. Stevie won.

What followed was the most sustained creative peak in popular music. Music of My Mind. Talking Book. Innervisions. Fulfillingness' First Finale. Songs in the Key of Life. Five albums in five years that redefined what a single artist could do. He played almost every instrument himself -- the clavinet on Superstition, the ARP synthesizer on Living for the City, the harmonica on Isn't She Lovely. He wrote about love, about systemic racism, about the afterlife, about a newborn daughter. He made the synthesizer sound human and the clavinet sound funky and the harmonica sound like it was weeping. Stevie Wonder didn't overcome his blindness. He made it irrelevant. What mattered was what he heard -- and he heard everything.

The songs are the argument. Superstition might be the funkiest record ever made by a man who can't see the dance floor. Living for the City is an eight-minute novel about a Black family moving from Mississippi to New York, complete with a spoken-word interlude where Stevie plays every character. Isn't She Lovely is the sound of a father watching his newborn daughter and trying to explain what he can't see but can feel perfectly. Songs in the Key of Life is a double album with a bonus EP -- 21 tracks, 105 minutes, and not a wasted second. It went to number one and stayed there for 14 weeks. It won Album of the Year.

The 1980s were a victory lap. He duetted with Paul McCartney on Ebony and Ivory. He led the campaign to make Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday. He won an Oscar for I Just Called to Say I Love You, the sappiest song he ever wrote, and audiences loved it so much they didn't care. The albums got safer, the production got slicker, but the musicianship never wavered. He's been a UN Messenger of Peace, a Kennedy Center honoree, a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He's played at every major event of the last 40 years. The voice has deepened, the arrangements have mellowed -- but if you want to hear what it sounds like when a blind kid from Michigan changes the course of popular music, put on Innervisions. Put on Songs in the Key of Life. The argument is already made.