They Won't Go When I Go

In August 1973, a log flew through the windshield of the car carrying Stevie Wonder and struck him in the forehead. He was in a coma for four days. When he regained consciousness, he could not speak for a week. The experience changed the direction of his music and the certainty of his spiritual convictions simultaneously.

“They Won’t Go When I Go” arrived the following year on Fulfillingness’ First Finale, the third in Wonder’s extraordinary run of 1970s albums, and it is the most direct reckoning with mortality in his entire catalog. A Chopin-esque piano-and-voice meditation on what follows death — and who will and won’t be admitted to what follows — the song builds from a sparse funeral-march opening into one of Wonder’s most overwhelming vocal performances.

The lyric is essentially a gospel song about judgment and grace, but written from a perspective of genuine personal reckoning rather than theological abstraction. Wonder had just survived something that should have killed him. The song’s certainty about what comes next carries the authority of someone who spent four days in the territory.

“They won’t go when I go / And I’ll be gone and they’ll be left behind / No more standing in a line / No more turning back of time / No more paying dues / I’ll be through with news.”

The vocal escalation across the song’s final two minutes — the controlled builds, the melismatic passages, the sustained notes that demonstrate the sheer technical mastery Wonder deployed so casually — is the performance of a lifetime. Not his most commercially successful, not his most stylistically influential, but perhaps his most emotionally naked.

The hits from Fulfillingness are “Boogie On Reggae Woman” and “You Haven’t Done Nothin’.” This is why the album is genuinely important.