There is a moment at the start of one of the most beloved songs of the 1970s that surprises people when they finally notice it. The voice singing the opening lines does not belong to the famous artist whose name is on the record. Neither does the second voice that follows.

For decades, many listeners simply assumed they were hearing the star from the very first note. Then someone points it out, and suddenly the whole opening feels different — warmer, more layered, more deliberately crafted than it first appeared.

The song is “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” by Stevie Wonder, released in 1972 on his landmark album Talking Book. And the two voices heard before Wonder himself enters are session singers Jim Gilstrap and Lani Groves.

Jim Gilstrap Sings First

Jim Gilstrap was one of the most in-demand session vocalists of his era, and his voice is woven into more classic recordings than most listeners ever realized. His tone is warm and clear — the kind of voice that sits comfortably in front of a microphone and makes whatever it touches feel a little more alive.

When “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” begins, it is Gilstrap who delivers the opening phrase. He does not announce himself. He simply steps up and sings, naturally and without fanfare, as if the song has always belonged to everyone in the room.

That choice was intentional. Stevie Wonder was not trying to hide his own voice or play a trick on listeners. The decision to open with guest singers was an artistic one — a way of spreading the joy the song carried across more than one set of vocal cords before Wonder himself arrived to claim it fully. The effect is immediate. The song feels communal from its very first seconds, like a room full of people who all share the same feeling and take turns saying so.

Gilstrap went on to have his own recording success in the mid-1970s, but his work as a session vocalist — including this brief, shining opening moment — remains among the most recognizable contributions of his career, even if most people who love the song could not have told you his name until recently.

Lani Groves Takes the Next Section

Immediately after Gilstrap completes his opening turn, Lani Groves steps in to carry the next phrase. Her voice has a slightly different quality — perhaps a touch more expressive, a little more reaching — and the brief handoff between the two singers creates a small, quiet moment of musical conversation before Wonder finally arrives.

Groves was also a respected backing vocalist and session performer. Like Gilstrap, she spent much of her career contributing to other artists’ records rather than standing at the front of her own spotlight. That kind of work requires a specific discipline: you have to serve the song completely, blending when the arrangement asks for it and stepping forward only when the moment calls for it.

Here, her moment is brief but memorable. She is not overshadowed by what comes after her. She is part of the architecture of the song, a deliberate pillar that holds the opening in place and makes Wonder’s eventual entrance feel like a natural arrival rather than an abrupt beginning.

It is worth noting that the backing vocal section on the recording also featured Gloria Barley alongside Gilstrap and Groves, adding another layer of warmth to the fuller vocal arrangement that runs throughout the track. The opening voices get the recognition, but the whole production is richer for everyone involved.

Together, these three singers helped give the song its particular texture — that sense of lightness and generosity that makes it feel, even after all these years, like a song that is being offered to you rather than simply performed at you.

Stevie Wonder Finally Enters

When Wonder’s voice does arrive, it does so with complete authority. There is no awkward transition, no sense that the earlier singers were simply warming up a cold microphone. Instead, the structure feels earned. Two voices have established the feeling, traced the shape of the emotion, and then the song’s author steps in to inhabit it fully.

Wonder was twenty-one years old when Talking Book was released in November 1972. He had recently negotiated a new creative contract with Motown that gave him full artistic control over his recordings — a significant moment in his career and, as it turned out, in pop music history. The album that followed was a demonstration of exactly what that freedom looked like in practice.

He wrote “You Are the Sunshine of My Life,” co-produced it, and played a remarkable range of instruments on the sessions. But he also brought in collaborators — musicians, arrangers, and vocalists — who helped him build the sound he was hearing in his head. The opening vocal arrangement was not an afterthought. It was a compositional choice, as deliberate as any chord or tempo decision in the recording.

The result is a song that sounds like it comes from a full world rather than a single performer. That generosity of spirit is part of what has made it last.

The Talking Book Sessions

Talking Book was the album that announced a new phase of Stevie Wonder’s artistic life. It arrived after a period of personal and professional transition — Wonder had spent time reassessing what he wanted from his music, and the results were unmistakable. The album moved between soul, funk, rock, and pop in ways that felt entirely natural rather than calculated.

The sessions drew on a wide circle of musicians and producers. Wonder worked with Robert Margouleff and Malcolm Cecil, whose synthesizer expertise helped shape the album’s distinctive sound. He collaborated with Jeff Beck on the rock-leaning tracks. And he brought in vocalists like Gilstrap and Groves to add human warmth to arrangements that might otherwise have felt dominated by instrumentation.

“You Are the Sunshine of My Life” stood somewhat apart from the heavier, more experimental material on the album. It was unabashedly romantic, melodically generous, and immediately accessible. Radio programmers noticed. Listeners responded. The song became one of the defining hits of 1972 and early 1973, and it carried Talking Book to a wider audience than Wonder might have reached on the strength of the album’s more adventurous tracks alone.

The production holds up remarkably well. Heard today, it does not sound like a period piece trying to recapture something lost. It sounds like a song that was built carefully enough to survive the decades with its warmth fully intact.

Number-One and Grammy Success

“You Are the Sunshine of My Life” reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in the spring of 1973. It also crossed over to the adult contemporary chart, where it found the kind of broad, multigenerational audience that only certain songs ever manage to attract.

At the 1974 Grammy Awards — honoring recordings from 1973 — the song won the Grammy for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance. It was an early signal that Wonder’s creative reinvention was being recognized not just commercially but critically. The award felt appropriate: here was a song that showcased everything a great vocal performance could do, from the restrained warmth of the opening guest singers to the full, joyful expression Wonder brought to his own lead vocal.

The song became a standard. It has been covered by artists across generations and genres, performed at weddings and celebrations and quiet evenings, and used in films and television programs too numerous to list. Each new version acknowledges, in its own way, that the original set a standard that is genuinely difficult to surpass.

What most of those covers do not replicate — and perhaps cannot easily replicate — is that opening structural choice. The two guest voices at the beginning are part of what makes the original feel so specific and so right. They are not decoration. They are the door through which the song invites you to enter.

Some recordings belong to a particular year. Others belong to a particular feeling that never quite leaves. “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” has always been the second kind. Jim Gilstrap sings the first phrase. Lani Groves follows. And then Stevie Wonder arrives — and the song becomes exactly what it was always meant to be.