Superstition

Superstition was supposed to be Jeff Beck's song.

During their 1972 sessions together, Beck tapped out a drum groove and Stevie Wonder built the clavinet riff on top of it. The plan was for Beck to release it first - but Motown put out Wonder's version, which hit No.1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in January 1973.

It went on to win two Grammys, including Best R&B Song.

Did you know Stevie Wonder played both the clavinet and the drums on the record?

Superstition began as a favour between two musicians. In 1972 Jeff Beck took part in sessions with Stevie Wonder, and Wonder had the song he intended to give Beck in return. Beck's own account, repeated in interviews over the years, is that the idea was for him to record it first.

Motown had other plans. The label saw a hit in Wonder's version and issued it as a single in late 1972 on its Tamla imprint, with the parent album, Talking Book, following the same autumn. Beck's version appeared afterwards, in 1973, on the album by Beck, Bogert & Appice. By then Wonder's record had already taken the song.

Talking Book was made when Wonder, then 22, had gained unusual creative control at Motown. He had turned 21 in 1971, let his old contract lapse and negotiated a new one that left him in charge of his own recordings. Superstition shows what he did with that freedom.

According to the album's liner notes, Wonder played the clavinet and the drums himself. The synthesizer bass came from the Moog equipment he worked with alongside the engineers Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff, whose TONTO synthesizer system shaped much of the album's sound. The horn section was added by Trevor Lawrence and Steve Madaio. Few major pop records of the period were built so largely by one person.

The Hohner Clavinet is an electric keyboard in which each key presses a string against a metal block, so the note arrives with a hard, percussive snap. Wonder used that attack the way a drummer uses a snare. The riff is less a melody than a rhythm, and it locks to his drumming so closely that the two are hard to separate.

The synthesizer bass fills the low end with a thick, rubbery tone that guitar or electric bass of the period rarely produced. The horns punch in on top, and the whole arrangement leaves gaps. The groove depends as much on the silences as on the notes, which is a large part of why the track still sounds so tight.

The subject matter is in the title: the song is about omens and the fears people build around them. Wonder sings it with a swagger that makes the subject sound like a dance floor warning.

Superstition reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in January 1973, according to Billboard's chart history. At the GRAMMY Awards held in 1974, Wonder won Best R&B Song for it, and the GRAMMY database also lists the song's other win that night, Best Male R&B Vocal Performance. Talking Book itself earned further nominations and wins in that period, which marked the start of a run of albums in the 1970s that cemented Wonder's reputation as a complete studio artist.

The story of the song has a quiet irony. A track written to hand to a guitarist became the one most closely tied to its writer's own hands, on keys and sticks. Beck went on to cover it, but the version that people know is the one Motown insisted on releasing.