Lula Mae Hardaway
*Lula Mae Hardaway was born on this date in 1930. She was a Black songwriter and the mother of musician Stevie Wonder.
Lula Mae Hardaway was born in Eufaula, Alabama, and was the daughter of sharecropper Noble Hardaway. Her childhood years were marked by hardship moving around among relatives before eventually reaching Saginaw, Michigan, where she married the much older Calvin Judkin, father of her children. The blindness of her third child, Stevland (Stevie Wonder), is because of being born weeks prematurely and then receiving too much oxygen in an incubator.
After moving with her family to Detroit, she divorced. It was in Detroit that the musical talents of Stevland – who by the age of 10 was playing and singing gospel tunes in church, then joining adults singing rhythm and blues on the street corners and came to have dubbed him "Little Stevie Wonder." Hardaway co-wrote many of her son's songs during his teenage years, including the hit singles "I Was Made to Love Her," "Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours," "You Met Your Match," and "I Don't Know Why I Love You", co-writing four songs on the 1968 album For Once in My Life. For co-writing 'Signed, Sealed, Delivered,' she was co-nominated for the 1970 Grammy Award for Best R&B Song.
In 1974, Hardaway was with then-23-year-old Wonder when he received his first Grammy. She was the subject of a 2002 authorized biography entitled Blind Faith: The Miraculous Journey of Lula Hardaway, Stevie Wonder's Mother. When she died on May 31, 2006, she had 20 grandchildren and great-grandchildren. A service was held at West Angeles Church of God in Christ. There were remarks by Motown founder Berry Gordy and songs by gospel singer Yolanda Adams and others.
