Word: motowners
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Married. Mary Wilson, 30, only original member still singing with the Supremes, extraordinary exemplars of the "Motown Sound"; and Pedro Antonio Ferrer, 30, the group's Dominican-born road manager; both for the first time; in Las Vegas...
...tabletops, or on dime-store cardboard drums. At nine, he was singing and playing harmonica up and down the Detroit ghetto streets, and being eased out of the church choir for singing rock 'n' roll. Three years later, he had become the "twelve-year-old genius" of Motown Records, the black pop giant. Rechristened Little Stevie Wonder, he was a strutting, shimmying minibopper who rode to the top of the record charts and $1 million in sales with a rhythm-and-blues shouter called Fingertips, Part...
Stevie was the third of six children in a not particularly musical family. He grew up in Detroit in what he likes to call "upper-lower-class circumstances." When he was ten, Stevie was picked up by Motown after a routine audition and subsequently enrolled at the Michigan School for the Blind, where classes were fitted into his career schedule. It would have been a mad life for any child. Stevie spent years on tour with the Motown Revue. Other performers would joke about not wanting to sleep in the hotel room next to his because he would keep them...
When Stevie turned 21, he rebelled against Motown. Yearning for a chance to experiment and weary of the record company's predilection for formula Top-40 hits, Wonder came to his contract-renewal sessions in 1971 demanding his own publishing company, higher royalties and the right to compose his words and music and cut his albums as he saw fit. After months of haggling, he got the total artistic freedom he wanted...
...first result was Wonder's 1972 album Music of My Mind, in which he showed complex new textures with the Moog and Arp synthesizers and a fresh repose in his love ballads. He had just married Syreeta Wright, a Motown secretary, and they collaborated on the lead song, Love Having You Around ("And when the day is through/ Nothin' to do, just sit around groovin' with you"). Alas, the groovin' lasted only 1½ years. Stevie and Syreeta are now divorced...