Hymn of the Week: December 25, 2023
I Wonder as I Wander
Text John Jacob Niles
Music American Folk Song
I wonder as I wander, out under the sky,
how Jesus the Savior did come for to die
for poor ordinary people like you and like I;
I wonder as I wander, out under the sky.
When Mary birthed Jesus, 'twas in a cow's stall
with wise men and farmers and shepherd and all.
but high from God's heaven a star's light did fall,
and the promise of ages it did then recall.
If Jesus had wanted for any wee thing,
a star in the sky, or a bird on the wing,
or all of God's angels in heaven for to sing,
he surely could have it, 'cause he was the King.
I wonder as I wander, out under the sky,
how Jesus the Savior did come for to die
for poor ordinary people like you and like I;
I wonder as I wander, out under the sky.
Today’s Devotion:
Today’s Christmas Devotion comes to us from the wonderful book by Andrew Gant, The Carols of Christmas: A Celebration of the Surprising Stories Behind Your Favorite Holiday Songs Nelson Book 2015. P. 127 and ff.
Turkey & Cranberry Sauce
Folk songs and Christmas go together like turkey and cranberry sauce. They are as much a part of our traditional Christmas festivities as fairy lights and traffic jams.
They didn’t always get there in a straight line. Sometimes the connection between folk imagery and Christmas is obscure, to say the least. Others originally had nothing to do with Christmas. Composers and clerics have draped seasonal associations all over them like tinsel on a tree.
All these songs owe their place in our repertoire to the person who first wrote them down. This, too, is not as straightforward a process as it sounds. Folk songs, by definition, exist in many different versions. They change from one village to the next, one generation to another. Which version should the collector use? What gives this person the right to set one particular version in stone? By preserving the oral tradition, are we not also ending it?
On the other hand, is the collector permitted to add something, to consider his own version just one variant among many? Is he/she allowed to polish up the original, or finish something that he finds incomplete? “I Wonder as I Wander” is an Appalachian folk song. Or at least a bit of it is.
The Collectors
The first collector to make a serious attempt to record the folk music of the Appalachian Mountains was an Englishman, Cecil Sharp. Sharp was unquestionably top of the class among collectors, a dedicated and sing-minded pioneer, going out along the highways and hedges of the south and west of England and elsewhere in search of songs, dances, melodies, ballads, and anything else he could find. The huge, wonderful archive based at Cecil Sharp House in London is his legacy.
Two decades later, John Jacob Niles enters the scene. Unlike his English predecessor, he was a child of the region this song comes from. He states the following:
When I was a child growing up in Kentucky, we made what we needed. The daily life of my people at home was full of interesting snatches of music – perhaps just a single couplet and four measures of melody . . . we made our own fun, we made our own music, we even made our own instruments. When I was quite small, my father bought me a three-string dulcimer. But when I was up in my teens and wanted a bigger and better dulcimer, my father told me to get busy and make one. I’ve been making my own dulcimers ever since.”
This same hands-on creative approach applies to the music as well as the instruments it is played on. If a song exists as just a few “interesting snatches” but could potentially be “usable in an extended and adapted form,” then your job as the singer is to finish it and use it. As Niles said later in life, “As I look back across fifty years of public performances, I’m convinced that a concert singer who is not also a composer and a poet is a definite disadvantage.”
“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.
Niles began including this song in his concerts. One of the clips below is Niles accompanying himself on the dulcimer. His lovely falsetto voice rings clear and true. The effect of putting it in a key where falsetto (light high singing for the male voice) creates an “other world” intriguing and compelling version.
The song, as we know in the 21st century, caught on quickly. It entered the repertoire of soloists and choirs from all over.
Whatever the details of this now timeless song, we have a gorgeous, haunting song with a kind of lilting, modal melody, and dialect-tinged lyrics that leap from every page. This is the voice of the authentic Appalachian hills.
The words have a strange mixture of the English Puritan and an earthier American religious accent that appears from the early days of the Bay Psalter and beyond. You can hear some of the English influence in phrases such as “The promise of ages” or “come for to die” and “it then did recall.” “Any wee thing” sounds strangely Scottish. At the same time, birthed and on’ry are distinctively American. (On’ry has of course connotations of cranky or cantankerous while also calling to mind the word ordinary).
We owe this lovely song to a chance encounter between a young girl and a musician of creativity and imagination. Niles, and others like him, have preserved for us uncountable musical riches. How many Anne Morgans have wandered off into silence and darkness, their motor car spluttering out of the town square they were evicted from, their washing retrieved from hanging on the Confederate statue, Silent Sam, the statue itself long vanished?
And how many songs are still out there?
So, I couldn’t decide which video to share so I am including three. You can hear John Jacob Niles sing the tune himself; my playing a jazz arrangement of it arranged by Michael Hassell; and finally, an elegant and phenomenally moving arrangement by the group, Chanticleer.
