May 13 - Blackfacts.com Black History Minute

BlackFacts.com: Learn/Teach/Create Black History

BlackFacts.com presents the black fact of the day for May 13.

Stevie Wonder was born.

He is an American singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, a child prodigy who developed into one of the most creative musical figures of the late 20th century.

Blind from birth and raised in inner-city Detroit, he was a skilled musician by age eight and made his recording debut at age 12.

Although still only in his mid-20s, Wonder appeared to have mastered virtually every idiom of African-American popular music and to have synthesized them all into a language of his own.

The best of his work formed a vital link between the classic rhythm-and-blues and

soul performers of the 1950s and ’60s and their less commercially constrained successors.

He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989, and in 1999 he was awarded the Polar Music Prize for lifetime achievement by the Royal Swedish Academy of Music.

In 2005 he received a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement. Four years later he was awarded the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song from the Library of Congress, and he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014.

Learn black history, teach black history at blackfacts.com