Stevie Wonder — Happy Birthday

Stevie Wonder's civil-rights anthem disguised as a party song is broadly charting today, appearing across 132 country and platform charts after a two-month absence. Written for the 1980 album Hotter Than July, the track was never a straightforward birthday number — Wonder built it as a promotional vehicle for the campaign to make Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday, according to Wikipedia. He landed on the song after setting out to record the traditional tune and realizing he didn't know it, per The Current. Decades on, its chorus doubles as the celebration standard heard at parties worldwide — a protest song that colonized birthdays. The mid-July return arrives just ahead of the Nelson Mandela Day date Wonder himself has marked in performance.