Today’s song is ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You’. This is a ballad that was written, produced and performed by Stevie Wonder. It remains Stevie Wonder's best-selling single to date, having topped a record 19 charts.
The song was the lead single from the 1984 soundtrack album ‘The Woman in Red’, along with two other songs by Stevie Wonder, and scored Number 1 on the ‘Billboard Hotb100’ for three weeks from October 13 to October 27, 1984. It also became his tenth Number 1 on the ‘Rhythm and Blues’ chart, and his fourth Number 1 on the ‘Adult Contemporary Chart. The song also became Wonder's only solo UK Number-1 success, staying at the top for six weeks, in the process also becoming ‘Motown Records’ biggest-selling single in the UK, a distinction it still holds as of 2018. In addition, the song won both a ‘Golden Globe’ and an Academy Award for Best Original Song’. The song also received three nominations at the 27th Grammy Awards for ‘Best Male Pop Vocal Performance’, ‘Song of the Year’, and ‘Best Pop Instrumental Performance’.
There was a dispute among Stevie Wonder, his former writing partner Lee Garrett and Lloyd Chiate as to who actually wrote the song. Chiate claimed in a lawsuit that he and Garrett wrote the song years before its 1984 release; however, a jury ultimately sided with Wonder.
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When I started my daily singing practise around fifteen months ago at the age of 75 years, I hadn’t sung in public since the age of 21 years, with one exception. That exception was at a public house in Scarborough one weekend.
For around two years after my divorce, I regularly stayed at an apartment on the Scarborough front with my three sisters and the occasional brother. We would spend the weekend talking about growing up years in the Forde family, and which of us had experienced the hardest or easiest upbringing. When those subjects weren’t being discussed we would naturally gossip about any absent family member, besides following a rock and rock singer who regularly sang in the seaside pubs and clubs. Naturally, we would be merry in both cordialities and in spirit and booze.
One of the pubs on the seafront has Karaoke twenty-four-seven and because my siblings were always talking about ‘Our Billy having been ‘a great singer as a teenager’ I was frequently urged to get up and give them a song. Not having sung for decades, public singing had become so fearful a prospect to me, and I would adamantly refuse. One evening, when in between the stages of mildly fresh to approaching the verge of drunkenness, I threw caution to the wind and had a go on the Karaoke machine.
The song I wanted and tried to sing was the Stevie Wonder number, ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You’. Not having once sung in public since I’d abandoned a singing career when out in Canada in 1964, after I’d discovered that I wasn’t the best singer on the Canadian scene at the time, my karaoke performance in the Scarborough pub went down as flat as a fart after I forgot both words and tune halfway through. And while all the other pub listeners and my family didn’t give a tinker’s cuss about my performance, I did!
I was highly embarrassed. I’d never felt so humiliated, especially as I’d allowed false pride and foolishness to give way to my better senses as my family in the pub chanted, ’Give us a song, Billy! Give us a song, brother!” To tell the truth, I felt a bit of a wimp having allowed myself to have been corralled back into the entertainment spotlight after a 64-year retirement break from public singing. None of the numerous prizes, trophies and cash I’d won during my years of development between the ages of 8 years and 21 years in regional and national singing contests and variety shows I had entered mattered one jot to me anymore. As far as I was concerned, all I would remember for the rest of my non-singing life (along with the rest of my beloved family and friends who were present at the spectacle) was the apologetic performance and pig’s arse I’d made of that Scarborough Karaoke night out; and all because I couldn’t keep my big mouth shut and sup my ale.
Over the past fifteen months, I am glad to say that the daily singing practice that I have made public from day one, (over 400 songs so far sung and video-recorded on my own ‘YouTube’ Channel) has led to me achieving five main things:
(1) I have improved my lung capacity and oxygenation levels in my blood by 20 per cent and have daily registered normal healthy readings for the past nine months in blood pressure levels, body temperature and oxygen/blood mix.
(2) I no longer have any public fear of singing.
(3) My willingness to try and sing a wide variety of songs in every singing style going has enabled me to greatly improve my vocal range to very presentable levels for a 76-year-old man.
(4) Daily singing practice, apart from making me healthier (and at a time when I have had three separate cancers to deal with in different parts of my body), has also made me happier. I have always been a positive and cheerful person who has fortunately never known one moment of depression in my life yet singing every day has made me even happier than I was before. It has even encouraged my lovely wife, Sheila (who has played both the organ and piano for many years) to take up the Ukulele and the Saxophone also. Her bedroom is full of musical regalia from wall to wall. For the nosey among you, we have had our own bedrooms ever since my painful legs have refused to stop kicking seven bells out of fresh air during my sleep whenever I get a muscle spasm. During my nightly sleep these days, my legs have taken on a life of their own and spontaneously operate like a farmer’s threshing machine throughout the night as they cut down the corn in their path
(5) Looking for new songs to sing daily, has enabled me to research the history of music and song over the past hundred years, and today it gives me great pleasure to find and sing a song that was first published a century ago whilst the following day to sing a hard rock song released ten years ago. The greatest pleasure though has been using my selection of daily songs to record in tandem as a history of my own life and development; which has been full and eventful.
The songs I sing engender memories of my childhood years, growing into an arrogant and fearless teenager who was brimming with confidence and determined to take on the world and beat it at its own game; before entering my twenties and thirties as I engaged in my research of human response patterns and pioneered a new method of dealing with aggressive offenders called 'Anger Management' that mushroomed and became popular in all English-speaking countries within a matter of years thereafter.
The strongest memory of my childhood years is my dearly departed mother who never went through a minute of any day she ever lived without a song in her heart. She literally sang as she worked.
I dedicate today’s song to my family as a better rendition of the same song I tried to sing, but couldn’t sing fifteen years ago in that Scarborough Karaoke pub. Should you want to view or access any of the 400 songs I have already video recorded on my YouTube Channel please use the link below: http://www.fordefables.co.uk/my-singing-videos.html
Love and peace Bill xxx
The song was the lead single from the 1984 soundtrack album ‘The Woman in Red’, along with two other songs by Stevie Wonder, and scored Number 1 on the ‘Billboard Hotb100’ for three weeks from October 13 to October 27, 1984. It also became his tenth Number 1 on the ‘Rhythm and Blues’ chart, and his fourth Number 1 on the ‘Adult Contemporary Chart. The song also became Wonder's only solo UK Number-1 success, staying at the top for six weeks, in the process also becoming ‘Motown Records’ biggest-selling single in the UK, a distinction it still holds as of 2018. In addition, the song won both a ‘Golden Globe’ and an Academy Award for Best Original Song’. The song also received three nominations at the 27th Grammy Awards for ‘Best Male Pop Vocal Performance’, ‘Song of the Year’, and ‘Best Pop Instrumental Performance’.
There was a dispute among Stevie Wonder, his former writing partner Lee Garrett and Lloyd Chiate as to who actually wrote the song. Chiate claimed in a lawsuit that he and Garrett wrote the song years before its 1984 release; however, a jury ultimately sided with Wonder.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
When I started my daily singing practise around fifteen months ago at the age of 75 years, I hadn’t sung in public since the age of 21 years, with one exception. That exception was at a public house in Scarborough one weekend.
For around two years after my divorce, I regularly stayed at an apartment on the Scarborough front with my three sisters and the occasional brother. We would spend the weekend talking about growing up years in the Forde family, and which of us had experienced the hardest or easiest upbringing. When those subjects weren’t being discussed we would naturally gossip about any absent family member, besides following a rock and rock singer who regularly sang in the seaside pubs and clubs. Naturally, we would be merry in both cordialities and in spirit and booze.
One of the pubs on the seafront has Karaoke twenty-four-seven and because my siblings were always talking about ‘Our Billy having been ‘a great singer as a teenager’ I was frequently urged to get up and give them a song. Not having sung for decades, public singing had become so fearful a prospect to me, and I would adamantly refuse. One evening, when in between the stages of mildly fresh to approaching the verge of drunkenness, I threw caution to the wind and had a go on the Karaoke machine.
The song I wanted and tried to sing was the Stevie Wonder number, ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You’. Not having once sung in public since I’d abandoned a singing career when out in Canada in 1964, after I’d discovered that I wasn’t the best singer on the Canadian scene at the time, my karaoke performance in the Scarborough pub went down as flat as a fart after I forgot both words and tune halfway through. And while all the other pub listeners and my family didn’t give a tinker’s cuss about my performance, I did!
I was highly embarrassed. I’d never felt so humiliated, especially as I’d allowed false pride and foolishness to give way to my better senses as my family in the pub chanted, ’Give us a song, Billy! Give us a song, brother!” To tell the truth, I felt a bit of a wimp having allowed myself to have been corralled back into the entertainment spotlight after a 64-year retirement break from public singing. None of the numerous prizes, trophies and cash I’d won during my years of development between the ages of 8 years and 21 years in regional and national singing contests and variety shows I had entered mattered one jot to me anymore. As far as I was concerned, all I would remember for the rest of my non-singing life (along with the rest of my beloved family and friends who were present at the spectacle) was the apologetic performance and pig’s arse I’d made of that Scarborough Karaoke night out; and all because I couldn’t keep my big mouth shut and sup my ale.
Over the past fifteen months, I am glad to say that the daily singing practice that I have made public from day one, (over 400 songs so far sung and video-recorded on my own ‘YouTube’ Channel) has led to me achieving five main things:
(1) I have improved my lung capacity and oxygenation levels in my blood by 20 per cent and have daily registered normal healthy readings for the past nine months in blood pressure levels, body temperature and oxygen/blood mix.
(2) I no longer have any public fear of singing.
(3) My willingness to try and sing a wide variety of songs in every singing style going has enabled me to greatly improve my vocal range to very presentable levels for a 76-year-old man.
(4) Daily singing practice, apart from making me healthier (and at a time when I have had three separate cancers to deal with in different parts of my body), has also made me happier. I have always been a positive and cheerful person who has fortunately never known one moment of depression in my life yet singing every day has made me even happier than I was before. It has even encouraged my lovely wife, Sheila (who has played both the organ and piano for many years) to take up the Ukulele and the Saxophone also. Her bedroom is full of musical regalia from wall to wall. For the nosey among you, we have had our own bedrooms ever since my painful legs have refused to stop kicking seven bells out of fresh air during my sleep whenever I get a muscle spasm. During my nightly sleep these days, my legs have taken on a life of their own and spontaneously operate like a farmer’s threshing machine throughout the night as they cut down the corn in their path
(5) Looking for new songs to sing daily, has enabled me to research the history of music and song over the past hundred years, and today it gives me great pleasure to find and sing a song that was first published a century ago whilst the following day to sing a hard rock song released ten years ago. The greatest pleasure though has been using my selection of daily songs to record in tandem as a history of my own life and development; which has been full and eventful.
The songs I sing engender memories of my childhood years, growing into an arrogant and fearless teenager who was brimming with confidence and determined to take on the world and beat it at its own game; before entering my twenties and thirties as I engaged in my research of human response patterns and pioneered a new method of dealing with aggressive offenders called 'Anger Management' that mushroomed and became popular in all English-speaking countries within a matter of years thereafter.
The strongest memory of my childhood years is my dearly departed mother who never went through a minute of any day she ever lived without a song in her heart. She literally sang as she worked.
I dedicate today’s song to my family as a better rendition of the same song I tried to sing, but couldn’t sing fifteen years ago in that Scarborough Karaoke pub. Should you want to view or access any of the 400 songs I have already video recorded on my YouTube Channel please use the link below: http://www.fordefables.co.uk/my-singing-videos.html
Love and peace Bill xxx
