1973 Stevie Wonder – You Are the Sunshine of My Life (US:#1 UK:#7)
“You Are the Sunshine of My Life” is a 1973 single released by Stevie Wonder. The song became Wonder’s third number-one single on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and his first number-one on the Easy Listening chart. It won Wonder a Grammy Award for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance, and was nominated for both Record of the Year and Song of the Year. This song was the second single (following “Superstition”) released from the 1972 album entitled Talking Book, which stayed at number one on the R&B charts for three weeks.
Rolling Stone ranked the song number 287 on their list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time”.
The first two lines of the song are sung, not by Wonder, but by Jim Gilstrap; Lani Groves sings the next two. Gilstrap and Groves, together with Gloria Barley, also provide backing vocals. The single version of the song differs from the album version with the addition of horns to the mix; this version is also included in the greatest hits compilation album Stevie Wonder’s Original Musiquarium I.
Album
Talking Book is the fifteenth studio album by Stevie Wonder, released on October 28, 1972. He is said to have “hit his stride” in this signal recording of his “classic period”. The album’s first track, “You Are the Sunshine of My Life”, hit #1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 and Easy Listening charts, then earned Wonder […]
Musicians
Bass | Scott Edwards |
Drums | Stevie Wonder |
Fender Rhodes | Stevie Wonder |
Congas | Daniel Ben Zebulon |
Background Vocals | Gloria Barley |
Vocals | Jim Gilstrap |
Vocals | Lani Groves |
Vocals | Stevie Wonder |
Produced By
Stevie Wonder
Songwiters
Stevie Wonder
Charts
US:#1
UK:#7