I wonder as I wander

This is a great Christmas song--joy, but also a haunting, mysterious quality.



I Wonder as I Wander
Words and Music by John Jacob Niles

I wonder as I wander out under the sky
How Jesus the Saviour did come for to die
For poor on'ry 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 shepherds and all
But high from God's heaven, a star's light did fall
And the promise of ages it then did 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 to sing
He surely could have it, 'cause he was the King

That first line "I wonder as I wander out under the sky," just puts into a few words the human condition: I wander out under the sky. And the first verse expresses a mystery worth contemplating: Why did Jesus come and die for ornery people like us? And I like that the melody is unresolved at the end because we never can solve that mystery, only ponder it in our hearts, like the Blessed Virgin.

I always thought the whole thing was an Appalachian folk song until today when I did a little online research and found that the composer John Jacob Niles has written this about the song:

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, coking, 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 plead 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. With the writing of additional verses and the development of the original melodic material, "I Wonder As I Wander" came into being. I sang it for five years in my concerts before it caught on. Since then, it has been sung by soloists and choral groups wherever the English language is spoken and sung.

It's interesting that the most profound verse did come out of that sort of spontaneous, instinctive singing--it's an idea that wells up naturally from the heart. What Mr. Niles did with this simple fragment was draw out the original theme, make a whole work, and then bring it to a wider audience. But the quality that appeals to the listener comes from the original source.