Stevie Wonder‘s Sing Your Song! As We Fix Our Nation’s Broken Heart tour couldn’t have come to North Carolina at a better time. While the tour was originally intended to fix the country’s fractured political divide ahead of the 2024 presidential election, a few weeks ago the Tar Heel State came in need of some serious mending.
Late last month, Hurricane Helene tore through the region, wreaking havoc on western North Carolina and causing the region’s worst flooding in over a century. As cleanup efforts continue around the hub of Asheville, 100-something miles away in Greensboro, Stevie Wonder brought his soulful music that has been healing physical, political, and racial divides in the United States since the 1960s.
Wonder’s history of healing in North Carolina goes back over 50 years, as he explained in a preamble before starting Thursday’s 27-song performance at the Greensboro Coliseum. On August 6th, 1973, the keyboardist was seriously injured in a car accident outside Salisbury that left him in a coma for four days and temporarily took his senses of taste and smell. Despite doctor’s orders, Wonder went on to perform at a benefit for Raleigh’s Shaw University in November of that year, raising over $10,000 for the school’s scholarship fund. Wonder’s gratitude hasn’t wavered in the intervening 51 years, as on Thursday he thanked the late surgeon Dr. Courtland Davis at the Winston-Salem hospital who saved his life…