22, a Hohner Clavinet, 1972: The Riff That Rebuilt Pop Music

Stevie Wonder was 22 when he cut the Hohner Clavinet riff that opens "Superstition" in 1972, and half a century later keyboard players still measure their phrasing against it. The song reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and became one of the defining records of 1970s funk.

Hohner built the Clavinet to mimic the bright, percussive bite of a clavichord, an early plucked-string keyboard. Wonder ignored the brief. He matched its sharp attack to a syncopated funk rhythm, played the drums as well as the Clavinet part, and let the horns punch in on the chorus.

What did a teenager know that Motown didn't?

Born Stevland Hardaway Judkins in Saginaw, Michigan, in 1950, Wonder grew up in Detroit and taught himself piano, harmonica and drums. By 11, Motown had signed him to its Tamla imprint and billed him as Little Stevie Wonder. At 13, "Fingertips", a live recording built on his harmonica and a spontaneous encore, took him to No. 1 on the Hot 100.

Motown's house system — songwriters, producers, arrangers and the legendary Funk Brothers studio band — gave him, in Eric Alper's account, an education most working musicians never get. Early singles such as "Uptight (Everything's Alright)", "I Was Made to Love Her", "For Once in My Life" and "My Cherie Amour" came out of that machine. Then he started running part of it himself. "Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours" in 1970 was his first single as his own producer.

In 1971, Wonder turned 21 and his original Motown contract came up. Rather than renew on the label's standard terms, he negotiated for artistic independence, including the right to produce his own records. Five albums followed in five years: 'Music of My Mind', 'Talking Book', 'Innervisions', 'Fulfillingness' First Finale' and 'Songs in the Key of Life', from 1972 to 1976.

What was TONTO?

In 1971 he heard the electronic sounds of Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff, whose experimental group Tonto's Expanding Head Band had released 'Zero Time'. Their instrument, TONTO — The Original New Timbral Orchestra — was an enormous modular synthesizer, a set of interconnected electronic modules patched together with cables.

Its towering cabinets, cables, switches and controls looked less like studio equipment than like a control room designed by a science-fiction filmmaker. Wonder got close to Cecil and Margouleff, who became creative partners, engineering recordings and programming the machines for his compositions. On 'Music of My Mind', "Superwoman (Where Were You When I Needed You)" moves through shifting electronic textures and moods.

When did the studio become the instrument?

Each track assembled an ensemble that never shared a room, with Wonder laying down drum pattern, bass, electric piano, synthesizers, percussion and vocal harmony in turn. 'Talking Book' split its personality: the Clavinet snarl of "Superstition" against the warmth of "You Are the Sunshine of My Life".

'Innervisions' in 1973 went further. "Higher Ground" is built from interlocking Clavinet parts and a propulsive drum pattern. "Living for the City" turned the record into audio drama, with dialogue, street sounds and the story of a young Black man moving from the American South to New York City. The same album carried "Golden Lady", "All in Love Is Fair" and "Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing", and won the Grammy for Album of the Year.

'Fulfillingness' First Finale' put a bouncing synthesized bass under Wonder's harmonica on "Boogie On Reggae Woman", and the covers proved the writing travels. The Red Hot Chili Peppers' 1989 version of "Higher Ground" put Flea's bass under the same skeleton, while Coolio's 1995 "Gangsta's Paradise" grew out of "Pastime Paradise", which Wonder had placed on 'Songs in the Key of Life' with synthesized string textures, percussion and choral elements.

'Songs in the Key of Life' was a double album plus an EP. "Sir Duke" toasted Duke Ellington with a horn arrangement. "I Wish" rode one of pop's great bass riffs. "Isn't She Lovely" marked the birth of his daughter Aisha. It debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and stayed 14 nonconsecutive weeks, and its Album of the Year Grammy made it three consecutive studio releases with the award. He was 26. Wonder also wrote and produced Rufus's "Tell Me Something Good", a Chaka Khan vocal over a Wonder groove.

What did he break next?

The instruments got stranger. 'Stevie Wonder's Journey Through "The Secret Life of Plants"' in 1979, a documentary soundtrack, leaned on the Computer Music Melodian, an early digital sampling device developed by Peter Samson and Dave Smith for Computer Music Inc. He also performed with the Fairlight CMI, the digital instrument that coloured the 1980s.

He had spent a decade making synths respectable to pop audiences, and now he was helping design the keyboard instruments the next decade of musicians would take for granted. Ray Kurzweil was the proof. Wonder had followed Kurzweil's reading technology for blind people since the 1970s; their exchange became Kurzweil Music Systems and the K250 synthesizer, introduced in 1984, with Wonder as musical adviser.

Elsewhere, "Ebony and Ivory" with Paul McCartney in 1982 reached No. 1 in the United States and Britain. He worked with Michael Jackson, and his harmonica turns up on recordings by Elton John and Eurythmics. It also surfaces on Chaka Khan's celebrated version of Prince's "I Feel for You". And "Happy Birthday", released on 'Hotter than July' in 1980, became the campaign song for making Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday.

Is the catalogue still load-bearing?

Yes. Prince, Michael Jackson, D'Angelo, Alicia Keys, Pharrell Williams and Anderson Paak each took something from it, and hip-hop producers have mined Wonder's rhythms and harmonies for decades, which keeps the catalogue among pop's most sampled bodies of work.

The ledger runs long: 25 Grammy Awards, more than 100 million records sold, plus the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Songwriters Hall of Fame, the Kennedy Center Honors and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. "Can We Fix Our Nation's Broken Heart" arrived in 2024. 'Songs in the Key of Life – The EP' followed in September 2026 with four previously unreleased recordings from the 1976 sessions.

Wonder's instruments — TONTO, the Melodian, the K250 — have all since become standard kit. The appetite behind them has not. On Alper's reading, the next great idea will probably start with a machine nobody has quite learned to play.