Signed, Sealed, and Delivered

How can one write with trenchancy of a genius who records a monster hit at age 12, cuts his teeth as a teen going hit for hit with some of the greatest Motown acts; dominates an entire decade with a soul and funk expansion the tremors of which are still being felt in music; settles onto the top of pop paradise with some of the biggest middle-road hits of all time; then marches on collaborating with soul scions whom he begat and headlines all over the world, still vital and influential and beloved wherever he goes? The answer to the question is "Signed, Sealed,and Delivered: The Soulful Journey of Stevie Wonder." Incredibly, all of the above fits quite nicely and with vivid detail into 300 pages that move as nimbly and effortlessly as "Uptight (Out of Sight)" or (fill in the blank with any of the man's 49 Top 10 hits). Ribowsky, who took 400 pages to cover the shorter Supremes' saga, manages to analyze every single Stevie Wonder track until the '90s and 00's works that have lesser meaning, and does it by getting inside the wondrous mind and cosmic soul of Stevie Wonder, from where all those songs in the key of life emanated. He draws on some of the very few Funk Brothers still alive for the '60s period of ascendancy, then Malcolm Cecil, the synthesizer master who opened the door to Stevie's ultimate creative impulses in the '70s. Along the way, we learn something we never could have assumed about Stevie Wonder -- that his beautiful music is the product of running away from memories of childhood that would have scarred the soul of someone less hardy and resilient. This is no easy thing to do -- witness Marvin Gaye and Michael Jackson, between whom Stevie came and conquered, and suffered the same depressions, addictions (not to drugs, thankfully, but sex in a way Tiger Woods can relate to. Stevie was the one who survived it all, because as Ribowsky posits, his music retained an essential optimism, which did no less than salvage his soul. It seems that Stevie could have ended it all at any time since he was the carefree kid who was in more control of his music than anyone at Motown, even as a teenager, and pulled Berry Gordy in to directions he was reluctant to take. Here he was, at 15, covering "Blowin' in the Wind," then making an instrumental album, then going full-bore with primordial funk in 1968, pre-Sly Stone, pre-P-Funk, pre-Billy Preston with "Shoo-Be-Doo-Be-Doo-Da-Day," which as Ribowsky suggests, is indivisible from the synth-pop-funk nirvana of "Superstition," the song that was the ultimate soul crossover, into the album-oriented FM rock charts of the early '70s. Ribowsky not only cites the tracks that were nuclear in their way, but peels away their layers and reveals their genesis, their technique, their tonal and lyrical ingredients and where they came from within Stevie's id. All the while, Stevie's life ran parallel with but seemingly inverted from the music he was making. His personal life was a mess; he blew it with the only wo