Lula Hardaway, pop star's mother

Stevie Wonder was at home in Detroit one day in the 1970s, playing around on the family piano. He had a piece of a melody, a slice of a lyric. And he sang it again and again: "Here I am baby.... Here I am baby.... "

Nearby was Lula Mae Hardaway, his mother, who eventually came up with the hook: "... signed, sealed and delivered. I'm yours."

That song would become a hit for Stevie Wonder. That moment was emblematic of a relationship between mother and son.

Ms. Hardaway, who co-wrote some of her son's hits such as "I Was Made to Love Her," and "Signed, Sealed and Delivered," died May 31. She was 75. The family disclosed no information about the cause or location of her death.

Ms. Hardaway told her life story in "Blind Faith, The Miraculous Journey of Lula Hardaway, Stevie Wonder's Mother." The 2003 authorized biography details her life of early abandonment and abuse and the extreme love she had for her children.

Ms. Hardaway was born Jan. 11, 1930, in Eufaula, Ala. Her mother was a teenager who left her in the care of a sharecropping aunt and uncle who reared Hardaway as their own.

Their deaths threw her world in turmoil; she moved around among relatives before eventually landing in Saginaw, Mich. There she married a man more than 30 years older, who physically abused her and forced her into prostitution for a time. Ms. Hardaway did it to buy food for her children, and stole coal to keep her family warm.

Surviving and escaping that life was an exercise in faith. But rearing her third child, born Stevland Judkins, was an act of negotiation, each day maneuvering through emotions of guilt and despair. She believed his blindness was God's retribution for things she had done. Yet she was convinced "that God had never placed a happier child on the face of the earth," wrote the authors of "Blind Faith."

She took him to faith healers and doctors for years, hoping to find a cure for the blindness that doctors surmised was caused when Wonder, born prematurely, received too much oxygen in an incubator. Wonder grew up undaunted, playing war with his brothers and children in the neighborhood, getting in trouble and mastering every instrument he picked up.

The family would move to Detroit, where Wonder would sign with Motown Records when he still was a boy. Ms. Hardaway would support him behind the scenes, rearing her family and occasionally helping write songs such as "You Met Your Match" and "I Don't Know Why I Love You."

In 1973, Wonder was seriously injured in a car accident, an eerie real-life version of a recurring nightmare Ms. Hardaway had had over the years. But Ms. Hardaway was with her then-23-year-old son at the Hollywood Palladium the following year when he received his first Grammy.

"I can only thank God he's alive to accept these awards," she said in a 1974 Los Angeles Times article.

Before the event, Wonder had expressed his desire for Ms. Hardaway to join him on stage if he won. He won many times that night and the final time his name was announced as a winner, Ms. Hardaway walked to the stage with him. Wonder handed the statuette to his mother. "Her strength has led us to this place," he is quoted as saying in "Blind Faith."

Wonder later purchased a house for his mother in the San Fernando Valley area, where she enjoyed a life of church, fishing, horse racing and cooking, including what family members called a "legendary peach cobbler."

In a statement released to the Los Angeles Times, Wonder said: "We prayed for our mother to have the best. We wanted her to be queen."

In addition to Wonder, Ms. Hardaway is survived by her children: Milton Hardaway, Calvin Hardaway, Kai Morris, Ann Patrice Judkins Hardaway, Timothy Hardaway and Renee Hardaway. Surviving siblings include: Effie Maybell Rhodes, Minnie Askew, Arthur Hardaway, Mary Ann Thomas and Herman Hardaway. She had 20 grandchildren and great-grandchildren. A son, Larry Judkins Hardaway, preceded her in death.