Wilson was born in Detroit, Michigan on June 9, 1934. He married his pregnant high school sweetheart, Freda Hood, when he was 17, and they had four children before divorcing in 1965. Wilson collapsed on stage in 1975 while performing with Dick Clark’s rock-and-roll revival tour and spent the remainder of his life in a coma. He died in Mount Holly, New Jersey on January 21, 1984 and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.
Wilson was one of the most distinctively dynamic soul performers of the 1960s. Few singers could match his vocal range or his pure physicality onstage. He was a genuine original, and his stylistic innovations in the 1950s were as important in the evolution of American pop, rock, and soul as those of James Brown, Nat King Cole, or Sam Cooke, despite the fact that his recordings seldom enjoyed the commercial impact that theirs did.
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