In our upcoming Christmas concert, Chorale will sing a number of well-known Christmas songs arranged for 4-part choir. Among these is “I Wonder As I Wander,” written by folklorist John Jacob Niles (1892-1980), and based on a song fragment he heard while traveling in the southern Appalachians.
Niles was born in Louisville, Kentucky, into a musical family. As a young man, he traveled through the Appalachian Mountains, working as a surveyor and transcribing folksongs he encountered along the way. After service in World War I, he studied music formally, eventually committing himself to what we now term ethnomusicology, collecting and transcribing folk songs, and researching and building folk instruments. He is also well-known as a composer and performer of music in the folk idiom, informed by what he collected.
In notes for an unfinished autobiography, Niles writes:
“I Wonder As I Wander” grew out of three lines of music sung for me by a girl who called herself Annie Morgan. The place was Murphy, North Carolina, and the time was July 1933. The Morgan family, revivalists all, were about to be ejected by the police, after having camped in the town square for some little time, cooking, washing, hanging their wash from the Confederate monument and generally conducting themselves in such a way as to be classed a public nuisance. Preacher Morgan and his wife pled poverty; they had to hold one more meeting in order to buy enough gas to get out of town. It was then that Annie Morgan came out—a tousled, unwashed blond, and very lovely. She sang the first three lines of the verse of “I Wonder As I Wander.” At twenty-five cents a performance, I tried to get her to sing all the song. After eight tries, all of which are carefully recorded in my notes, I had only three lines of verse, a garbled fragment of melodic material—and a magnificent idea.
Based on this fragment, Niles composed the version of "I Wonder as I Wander" that is known today, extending the melody to four lines and the lyrics to three stanzas. His “folk composition” process caused confusion among listeners and singers, many of whom believed the piece to be an authentic folk song, anonymous in origin. Niles went to court to establish his authorship, and charged other performers royalties to perform it.
Chorale has chosen to sing the piece as arranged by British composer and conductor John Rutter (b. 1945). One of the best-known and most successful composers working today, Rutter is particularly noted for his carols, both his original compositions and his arrangements.
