Songs in the Key of Life: Stylistic Adaptation and the 1970s Music Industry (Professor Justin Williams, University of Bristol)

The 1970s have been described as a ‘fragile decade’ in US history: Nixon’s resignation, the decreasing popularity of the Vietnam War, waning public faith in national government, economic recession, the OPEC oil crisis, mass unemployment, economic deregulation, and the lack of fulfilment of many of the promises of the Civil Rights movement. In contrast, the recorded music industry continued on a rising trajectory, with ever more financial support from multinational corporations. In 1975 Stevie Wonder signed a new contract with Motown for an unprecedented $37 million, one which gave him full artistic control over his projects. The first output from this new contract was the Grammy-winning Songs in the Key of Life, a double album released in 1976 with additional four-song EP. The album is seen as the culmination of his ‘mature period’, and it has frequently topped the best albums of the 1970s lists. SitKoL is reflective of Black pop’s ties to its history: soul, funk, blues, and jazz, but also borrows from rock’s growing excess and jazz fusion’s proclivity for hybridity. Using SitKoL as case study, my paper demonstrates how the album can be understood as the culmination of Wonder’s own personal musical style; as contextualizing the rising support infrastructure of the music industry (and Black capitalism); and as exemplary of superstar 1970s artists’ ability to adapt multiple styles (Schnittke 1971; Williams 2022) to their own maximalist visions.

JUSTIN A. WILLIAMS is a Professor in Music at the University of Bristol (UK), the author of Rhymin and Stealin: Musical Borrowing in Hip-Hop (Michigan, 2013) and Brithop: The Politics of UK Rap in the New Century (Oxford, 2021). He is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop (Cambridge, 2015), and co-editor (with Katherine Williams) of the Cambridge Companion to the Singer-Songwriter (2016) and the Singer-Songwriter Handbook (2017). As a musician in California, he led a jazz piano trio and played trumpet with the award-winning band Bucho!