Two lines into Stevie Wonder's "You Are the Sunshine of My Life," before Wonder himself ever sings a note, another voice carries the melody alone: high, clear and unmistakably lead. It belongs to Jim Gilstrap, a Texas-born session singer who spent five decades as one of the most recorded background vocalists in American pop music. Gilstrap died on July 18, 2026, at age 79, according to SoulTracks.

Gilstrap was born November 10, 1946, in Pittsburg, Texas (some biographies list the neighboring town of Daingerfield), and served in the U.S. Navy Reserve during the Vietnam War era before turning to music full time. He worked his way through Los Angeles vocal groups including the Doodletown Pipers and the Cultures, building the formally trained, sight-reading musicianship that would make him a favorite of producers for the rest of his career, according to La Voix Studio.

That reputation reached Stevie Wonder's camp in the early 1970s, when Gilstrap joined Wonder's backing group, Wonderlove, and sang on the albums Talking Book and Innervisions. On "You Are the Sunshine of My Life," recorded at Electric Lady Studios in New York, Gilstrap opens the song alone for two lines before fellow Wonderlove singer Lani Groves takes the next two and Wonder enters last, according to uDiscover Music. The single topped the Billboard Hot 100 and won the Grammy for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance.

Gilstrap's voice reached television audiences too. He sang male co-lead, with Blinky Williams, on the gospel-tinged theme to the sitcom Good Times, written by Dave Grusin with Alan and Marilyn Bergman and released as a single in February 1974. The following year, signed to Chelsea Records, he stepped out from behind other singers with "Swing Your Daddy," a Kenny Nolan production that reached number 4 on the UK Singles Chart and spent eleven weeks there, according to the Official Charts Company, while climbing to number 10 on Billboard's R&B chart in the United States. He released a second album, Love Talk, in 1977.

Those hits aside, Gilstrap's real career was heard rather than seen. He sang backing and session vocals for artists as varied as Quincy Jones, Aretha Franklin, Bill Withers, Patti LaBelle, Barbra Streisand, Boz Scaggs, Michael Jackson and, decades later, Adele and Katy Perry, and lent his voice to film and television work including Grease and Disney's TaleSpin, singing that cartoon's theme when it premiered in 1990.

In his later years Gilstrap turned to teaching, working as the sight singing and sight reading instructor at La Voix Studio in Studio City, California. He was married to his wife, Gloria, with whom he appeared at industry gatherings including the studio's 2023 Music de Maison gala in Bel Air alongside former Supremes singers Lynda Laurence and Susaye Greene. He was survived by Gloria, his children and grandchildren, and was the last surviving member of ten siblings.

Most of what Gilstrap built lived without his name attached: the opening bars of one of Stevie Wonder's signature hits, the theme that greeted television audiences before every episode of Good Times, a Top 5 record of his own in Britain, and, in his final years, the ears of the students he coached note by note at La Voix Studio. The credits rarely spelled out his name. The recordings still do the work anyway.