Sir Roderick David Stewart was born on January 10, 1945, at 507 Archway Road in Highgate, north London, the youngest of five children born to Robert Joseph Stewart and Elsie Rebecca Gilbart. His father was Scottish, a former master builder from Leith in Edinburgh who had settled in London, while his mother was English, having grown up in Upper Holloway. They had married in 1928 and moved to London with their family, and it was in this working-class north London household that the voice which would sell more than 120 million records worldwide first found its bearings.
Stewart's musical education was informal and restless. His career began in 1962 when he took to busking with a harmonica, a mode of performing that suited the itinerant, exploratory spirit that would characterize his entire career. He moved through a series of bands during the early 1960s before joining the Jeff Beck Group in 1967, a band that placed him alongside one of rock's most technically gifted guitarists and exposed him to a wider international audience. Guitarist Steve Cropper, who had worked with Otis Redding and was not given to casual praise, would later describe Stewart as ranking alongside Redding as the finest singer with whom he had ever worked.
In 1969 Stewart joined Faces, a hard-rocking British group that became one of the most celebrated live acts of the early 1970s. Simultaneously, he launched a solo career, releasing his debut album An Old Raincoat Won't Ever Let You Down that same year. His early albums were characterized by a fusion of rock, folk music, soul, and rhythm and blues, a mixture that gave his work a textural richness and emotional directness that critics and audiences responded to strongly.
His commercial breakthrough came with his third album, Every Picture Tells a Story, released in 1971. The album topped the charts simultaneously in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and Australia, an achievement that few artists in the rock era had managed. Its lead single Maggie May, a raw, emotionally direct song about a young man's affair with an older woman, became one of the defining tracks of the decade. The follow-up album Never a Dull Moment in 1972 reached number one in the United Kingdom and Australia and went top three in the United States and Canada. Its single You Wear It Well topped the UK chart.
After Faces broke up in 1975, Stewart's solo career entered its most commercially dominant phase. Atlantic Crossing that year produced the ballad Sailing, which became one of his signature songs and a UK number-one album. A Night on the Town in 1976 became his fifth consecutive UK chart-topper, beginning a three-album run in which each release reached number one or the top three in the UK, United States, Canada, and Australia. Tonight's the Night (Gonna Be Alright) from that album spent almost two months at number one in the United States and Canada. Foot Loose and Fancy Free in 1977 contained the hit You're in My Heart (The Final Acclaim) as well as the rocker Hot Legs. Blondes Have More Fun in 1978 and its disco-tinged Da Ya Think I'm Sexy topped charts in Canada, Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom, and entered the top ten in numerous other countries. Stewart's albums also performed strongly in the Netherlands throughout the 1970s and in Sweden from 1975 onward.
A disco and new wave period in the late 1970s and early 1980s gave way to a softer rock and middle-of-the-road style that sustained his chart presence through the 1980s, with most releases reaching the top ten in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Sweden. His 1991 album Vagabond Heart, which reached number two in the United Kingdom and number ten in the United States, marked his strongest American chart performance in a decade. Its single Rhythm of My Heart was a top five hit across multiple major markets. In 1993 he collaborated with Bryan Adams and Sting on the power ballad All for Love, which reached number one in many countries worldwide.
The early 2000s brought a new and unexpected commercial peak when Stewart recorded a series of albums interpreting the Great American Songbook, the classic popular standards of the twentieth century. The series was a critical and commercial success, introducing his voice to listeners who had not grown up with his rock material and demonstrating the remarkable adaptability of that instrument across different musical idioms.
The accumulation of honors across his career reflects a scope that few artists in popular music have matched. In 2008 Billboard magazine ranked him the seventeenth most successful artist in the history of the Billboard Hot 100 chart. He holds ten number-one albums and 31 top-ten singles in the United Kingdom, with six reaching the top position. In the United States he has 16 top-ten singles, including four that reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100. He received both a Grammy Award and a Brit Award, was voted at number 33 in Q Magazine's list of the top 100 greatest singers of all time, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice: as a solo artist in 1994 and as a member of Faces in 2012. He was inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2006. In Britain's 2016 Birthday Honours he was knighted for services to music and charity, completing a journey from a north London street busker to a figure recognized by the state as one of his country's great cultural exports.
