“His driver quickly turned off the radio and they drove on in silence and shock, tears streaming down Wonder’s face,” wrote journalist Marcus Baram in his beautifully told story about Happy Birthday in Medium magazine in 2015.Ī devastated Wonder, who had met King two years earlier at a freedom rally in Chicago, flew to Atlanta for the pastor’s funeral five days later as angry riots erupted in several cities around the US.Īfrican-American congressman John Conyers, who had just introduced a bill to honour King by making his birthday a national holiday, was also at the funeral. A 17-year-old Stevie Wonder, already a teen music sensation, was being driven to his home in Detroit from the Michigan School for the Blind when he heard the news of King’s assassination on the car radio. James Earl Ray shot and killed civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr that day in Memphis, Tennessee. One song that will certainly feature as we celebrate New Frame’s first anniversary is Stevie Wonder’s Happy Birthday.īut this upbeat, uplifting song is actually rooted in an assassination on 4 April 1968, one many feared could unleash civil war in the United States. I’m no prophet but it’s safe to predict that exercise, the getting pissed part, will be repeated tonight at the bar where I play a fortnightly all-vinyl DJ set.

Like good journalists, the New Frame crowd got totally smashed that evening.

The subcontinent comrades flicked the switch and the site went live as the sun set over Johannesburg. Finally, the visual editor got hold of the techies from the Radical Software IT Workers Union (really their name) in Hyderabad, India, who had designed New Frame’s website for free.

That’s where the best wi-fi was for South Africa’s newest and then still office-less online news publication.Ĭomputer bugs had been pushing the launch of New Frame – planned to coincide with the anniversary of the Marikana massacre, in which the South African police had killed 34 striking mineworkers six years earlier – later and later. Although it was late afternoon, New Frame’s news editor was still in her pyjamas the rest of New Frame’s knackered, but anxious editorial staff were in her kitchen. It was exactly a year ago to the day, on Thursday 16 August 2018. Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window).Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window).Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window).

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Happy birthday song by stevie wonder