So I feel like if you are black and if you have been at a birthday celebration with other black folks, you know that when it comes time to sing happy birthday, there's no asking what version you're singing.

You're singing the well-known Stevie Wonder version, right?

Like I've been at some birthdays where people are like, all right, we're singing happy birthday and there's some black folks in the room and they're like, what version are we singing?

But I feel like if you're at a function where there's all black folks, it's almost like the rhythm just permeates the room of its own accord.

And I think that I grew up knowing that.

I grew up knowing and loving Stevie Wonder's happy birthday, but knowing nothing about the actual

historical function of it or even the album it existed on or when it was made. It was just like,

this is the way we sing happy birthday in the neighborhood I'm from. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday. Happy birthday to you.

Happy birthday to you.

Happy birthday

Happy birthday sits on Hotter than July.

And Hotter than July is an album, I think, is one of the great Stevie Wonder albums that does not get the love and respect it deserves, in part because it falls outside of his great run of albums in the 70s, and it came after an album that was really divisive and deeply experimental, The Secret Life of Plants, and it was just kind of him returning to something new at the start of the decade. And I think that is why Stevie

Wonder in 1980 is so interesting. But just off of the happy birthday version alone, which Stevie Wonder

wrote in an effort to have Martin Luther King's birthday recognized nationally as a holiday, I think that

harder than July is a really brilliant and enduring artifact

of Stevie Wonder

looking at where he'd been

and thinking of somewhere new to go.

I'm Hennev-Fabderakib

and from KCRW

this is Lost Notes, 1980.

Stevie Wonder.

...