The song that woke Stevie Wonder from a coma: “This is like my second chance for life”
Imagine a song so powerful it could perform a medical miracle. The effects that art can have on the human body have been studied time and time again but still remain somewhat of a mystery. Sure, doctors can look at how brain waves react to songs, but the way music can impact the spirit is a marvel they’ll never truly understand. For Stevie Wonder, his love of music was a thing so powerful that it quite literally brought him back to life.
It was August 6th, 1973. Wonder had just released his new album, Innervisions, only three days before when he was performing a concert in Greenville, South Carolina. On the way home, exhausted from the adrenaline rush of the show, he was asleep in the front of a car as his friend drove, snaking past trucks piled high with logs. Then suddenly, one truck hit the brakes too quickly for Wonder’s driver to react. A log smashed through the windshield and hit the musician right in the head.
It was a blow that could have been fatal. Wonder was injured badly, pulled from the wreck unconscious and covered in blood. Suffering from a severe concussion, he lay in a coma for ten days.
People were fearing for his life. The stats on comas don’t look good, as a heavy proportion never wake up or at least never get their mobility back. While the singer lay unconscious, a stream of worried friends and loved ones came in to see him and talk to him, attempting to get some response.
One day, his friend and tour director, Ira Tucker, came in. “I remember when I got to the hospital in Winston-Salem…man, I couldn’t even recognize him. His head was swollen up about five times normal size. And nobody could get through to him,” he recalled. But rather than just talking to the musician, Tucker used the thing that Wonder loved most in the hope of getting through to him.
“I knew that he likes to listen to music really loud, and I thought maybe if I shouted in his ear, it might reach him. The doctor told me to go ahead and try, it couldn’t hurt him,” he said. “The first time I didn’t get any response,” he continued, but it seemed to just be the wrong song.
He said, “The next day I went back and I got right down in his ear and sang ‘Higher Ground’.”
The track had just come out on the new album and immediately proved strangely prophetic. The song is about reincarnation and being granted another chance in life. He sings, “I’m so darn glad He let me try it again,” thanking God for a second go round on earth. As Tucker sang the song, it’s lyrics were like magic as the musician suddenly grasped at that chance at life.
“His hand was resting on my arm and after awhile his fingers started going in time with the song. I said yeah! Yeeeeaaah! This dude is going to make it!” Tucker remembered, as the power of the song and the power of Wonder’s love for music brought him back.
It changed Wonder’s relationship with that song forever as he said, “For me, I wrote ‘Higher Ground’ even before the accident. But something must have been telling me that something was going to happen to make me aware of a lot of things and to get myself together.” As he recovered and returned to his work, career and life, there was a whole new perspective. He said, “This is like my second chance for life, to do something or to do more, and to value the fact that I am alive.”
