"Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I'm Yours" (Stevie Wonder)

Stevie Wonder's 1970 hit single "Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I'm Yours" was a landmark: it was the first time Motown chief Berry Gordy had allowed him to both write and produce on his own.  (Thankfully, it wasn't the last.)  It also was his first Grammy nomination—not to mention the first Grammy nom for his mother, Lula Mae Hardaway, who is credited as a co-writer on the track.  Apparently, after she heard him play the melody on piano for the first time, she exclaimed, "Signed, sealed, delivered, I'm yours!" giving him the idea for the hook.

The first time I heard the track was in summer 1987.  My family was packed into my mom's Oldsmobile, heading down I-26 to the South Carolina coast.  I was crammed into the backseat with a cooler full of Sunkist and enough snacks to feed five families.

Back in those days, there used to be a radio dead zone between suburban Columbia, SC, and the junction of I-95, where all you could pick up were faint signals, all bleeding together in a garble of incoherent static.  It always was my least favorite stretch of the trip: the topography was flat, skinny pine trees and sweltering asphalt were the only things to look at outside the car window, and there was no music.  Not even the crappy adult contemporary stuff my parents often chose to listen to in those days.  It was very "are we there yet?"-inducing for a 9-year-old kid.

So the moment I began seeing billboards and road signs indicating that we were about 50 miles from Charleston, I started lobbying my parents to turn the radio back on.  Nothing was coming in all that well, except for this one station (I believe out of Orangeburg, SC) that was playing vintage R&B.  I was going through a phase at the time anyway of wanting to hear nothing but oldies, largely because my friend Bill had been sharing mixtapes of his mom's old vinyl with me.  So throwback soul was right up my alley.

Anyway, crackling through the static, came this funky electric sitar riff, followed by this sanctified howl and barrage of drums.  Although I wasn't familiar with the song itself, the moment the vocal kicked in, I instantly knew it was Stevie Wonder.  And by the first chorus, I was jamming: Oooh, baby, here I am / Signed, sealed, delivered, I'm yours.

Then a curious thing happened: about halfway through the track, the right channel suddenly dropped out.  The song kept playing, but it felt lopsided—the bass, the backing singers, and the tambourine all had vanished.

The moment the song had finished, the DJ came on with an announcement.  "Ladies and gentlemen, we had some technical difficulties on that last one.  So I'm going to play it again.  Because Stevie deserves to be heard in stereo."

And he immediately played the song again, in its entirety.  It was one of the coolest things I've ever heard a DJ do.  I think about it every time I play this track.

(And Stevie does deserve to be heard in stereo, by the way.)