STEVIE WONDER - I WAS MADE TO LOVE HER

This week in 1967, STEVIE WONDER released the single I WAS MADE TO LOVE HER (May 1967).

NOTE: I've upscaled, re-edited and improved the colour saturation of this TV clip.

Written by Stevie, who was 16 at the time, together with his mother Lula Mae Hardaway, Motown songwriter Sylvia Moy, and the song's producer Henry Cosby, the song spent four non-consecutive weeks at #1 on the American Hot Rhythm & Blues Singles chart.

Wonder's mother co-wrote many of Wonder's songs during her son's teenage years. She was nominated for the 1970 Grammy Award for Best R&B Song for co-penning "Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours."

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Wonder recalled to the Rock Around The World newspaper that this song, "kind of speaks of my first love to a girl named Angie, who was a very beautiful woman."

He added: "Actually, she was my third girlfriend but my first love. I used to call Angie up and, like, we would talk and say, 'I love you, I love you,' and we'd talk and we'd both go to sleep on the phone. And this was like from Detroit to California, right? You know, mother said, 'Boy, what you doing - get off the phone!' Boy, I tell you, it was ridiculous."

Sylvia Moy, who is in the Songwriters Hall of Fame, also worked on Wonder's songs "Uptight (Everything's Alright)" and "My Cherie Amour."

She says that her inspiration for "I Was Made To Love Her" was stories she heard from her parents - her mother is from Arkansas, which is why Stevie opens the song singing, "I was born in Little Rock."

After his initial success as "Little" Stevie Wonder, he stopped playing harmonica on most of his songs to help shed the image. On this track, Wonder's harmonica came back strong.

Who played bass on this track is a matter of dispute. Motown used top Los Angeles studio musicians like Carol Kaye for some of their recordings at this time, but records of these sessions are either nonexistent or inaccurate, as certain union rules were bypassed to make them happen.

The stunning vocal on this song took some work. Producer Henry Cosby coaxed it out of Wonder by taking him to a Baptist church in Detroit and having Stevie imitate the preacher. The next step was finding Wonder his congregation. "Stevie wanted people in the studio. He had to feel the presence of people," said Cosby. "If there were none around, his vocal was just dead. I had to go outside and just stop people who were passing to bring them in, so Stevie could feel their presence. Once we got that, he could fire into that feeling."