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OPINION | CRITICAL MASS: On Stevie Wonder and the Summer of Soul
by
Philip Martin
|
Today at 2:00 a.m.
Stevie Wonder sings “It’s Your Thing” at the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, as seen in the documentary “Summer of Soul.”
There is a perspective distortion that comes with looking backward.
Stevie Wonder was 19 on July 20, 1969, when he walked onstage at the Harlem Cultural Festival, an event that would be lost to legend and rumor were it not for Ahmir Questlove Thompson s just-released directorial debut Summer of Soul (. or When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised).
He looks so young, whippet-slim and dangerous in a way you don t expect this avatar of joy to have ever looked. I know better, but still expected him to seem at least a decade older. By the summer of 1969, Stevie Wonder d already released 10 albums. Berry Gordy had signed him to Tamla Records, a Motown subsidiary, when he was 11 years old. He d been on the radio, in my ears, nearl