Editor’s Note: This is part of a series called UChicago Class Visits, spotlighting transformative classroom experiences and unique learning opportunities offered at UChicago.
In a University of Chicago classroom, an activist in her 80s who grew up hearing Stevie Wonder in his prime sat a few seats from a 19-year-old discovering his music for the first time.
That was the scene every Wednesday evening in "Wonder Lab: Learning from the Musical Art and Craft of Stevie Wonder,” a Winter Quarter course developed and led by Adam Green, an associate professor in the Departments of Race, Diaspora, & Indigeneity and History.
“Part of it is, surprise, I love Stevie Wonder, and thought that it would be fun and exciting and revelatory to teach his music," Green said, explaining the rationale behind the course. But he also set out to explore a “paradox” at the heart of Wonder's legacy—that “he's beloved, but people have a hard time explaining why he's influential.”
Born in Michigan in 1950, Wonder started his long career as a child prodigy, signing with the Motown label at the age of 11. From 1972-76, a time that became known as his “classic period,” Wonder released five major albums—three of which won consecutive Grammys for Album of the Year, making him the only artist ever to achieve this feat. In total, Wonder has won 25 Grammys, the most of any solo artist.
But for all this acclaim, Green said, Wonder's work remains curiously underexamined. Green pointed to the often-unsung influence of the musician's long history of activism; his fight for creative control at Motown; pioneering approach to synthesizers and studio production; and the depth of his collaborations with other artists. The Wonder Lab pushes into this scholarly gap, examining questions of craft, politics and history that reverence tends to obscure.
“Everything he did that changed the ways people think about popular music, how it’s recorded and its relationship to Black musical forms—all of that is implicit for some people,” Green said.
Students in the course listen closely to albums and live performances while reading biography, criticism and scholarship on Black cultural leadership.
A class discussion may begin with a song—for example, “Happy Birthday,” which Wonder wrote as part of a years-long campaign to establish Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a federal holiday—and move outward into questions of race, legacy and the uses of art.
What makes the Wonder Lab especially distinctive, though, is the people who fill the room.
Half the seats are filled by UChicago undergraduates while the other half are for community members from across the city, ranging in age from their mid-20s to their 80s. Green hopes this mixed enrollment model can become an even more regular fixture of courses offered by the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity and, perhaps, the wider University.
“There are many roots and sources of wisdom,” Green said.
Wonder, heard across generations
Community members included musicians, educators, critics, activists and lifelong Chicagoans.
Some brought professional experience in the arts, others came because they loved Wonder and wanted to think more deeply about his work. The result, Green said, was a course in which students were not simply responding to a professor, but learning from one another.
For participants, that mixed-enrollment model gave the course much of its meaning.
Jasmine Barnes, a Hyde Park resident and community participant in the course, said what stayed with her most was the range of people in the room.
“I think about Miss Billie [Jean Miller Gray] and Miss Dorothy [Burge], and the one or two other folks who are elders, who really grew up in time with Stevie Wonder’s music,” she said. “That’s been really special.”
At the same time, she said, learning alongside younger students brought something equally valuable.
“To be with students who are 19 and who are maybe discovering music for the first time, or who have a very different viewpoint on the world than I do … that’s been really special too,” she said. “A lot of people in this class would never have imagined going to UChicago, but who got to kind of get a taste of what that type of academic rigor was like because of this class.”
Another community participant, Steven Jackson, a musician and producer at the Old Town School of Folk Music, said the course’s richness came from the range of experiences gathered in one place.
“You have Dorothy [Burge], who’s an older Black woman, who’s been an activist since before I was alive, and she grew up hearing Stevie when he was dropping music fresh,” he said. “Then you also have students that maybe aren’t as familiar with Stevie, and they’re kind of really getting into him for the first time through this class.”
Music as a living document
Part of what made those conversations so resonant was the way the course treated music not as an isolated object of study, but as something that moves through people’s lives.
Green recalled one discussion of Wonder’s song “Big Brother,” inspired by George Orwell’s 1984, in which a community member connected the song’s themes of surveillance and political consciousness to her own activism against police violence in Chicago.
“That’s a great sort of testimony to bring in,” Green said, “in terms of thinking about what a song like that brings you to, and what it reminds you of.”
Jackson described one early session as something like a listening party, with participants responding not only to Wonder’s lyrics and themes, but to the music’s finer details.
“We had ladies talking about the whole-tone scale. We had men talking about how the hi-hat grooves. We had, ‘Oh, he’s repeating this lyric over and over again—why?’” he said. “So that was really cool.”
The course’s final projects were original music inspired by Wonder’s work, visual art, traditional academic responses and a concluding gathering built around presentations and a shared meal.
Participants left with a stronger understanding of Stevie Wonder’s artistry and a greater willingness to share their own ideas.
“It made me want to share more,” Jackson said. “It reminded me it’s very rich to offer up what you have, what you think anyway.”
Barnes said those shared conversations will stay with her.
“I’ll never forget this experience. Whenever I hear his music, I’ll think about the conversations that I had in this class.”
