| Author | Topic: Add: I Wonder as I Wander | |
| Mary in Kentucky | Posted - 12 Oct 03 - 01:52 am | |
I Wonder as I Wander I wonder as I wander, out under the sky, How Jesus the Savior 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 the heavens 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 for to sing, He surely could have had 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 on'ry people like you and like I... I wonder as I wander, out under the sky. Source: The Second Penguin Book of Christmas Carols, ed. Elizabeth Poston. Notes: ...collected by John Jacob Niles in North Carolina (Songs of the Hill-Folk, G. Schirmer Inc., New York, Set 14 of Schirmer's American Folk Song Series), a meditative solo-type folk song that should sound essentially free and improvisatory with only the lightest suggestion of accompaniment to the reflective vocal line. Database entry is here. | ||
| Malcolm Douglas |
Posted - 12 Oct 03 - 04:40 am | |
There are doubts about the authenticity of a good few of the songs that Niles published. In a number of cases he presented material as traditional, sometimes accompanied by circumstantial details relating to its collection; and later stated that he had instead written it himself, on at least one occasion taking legal action to establish ownership. His repeated inconsistencies mean that it is unsafe to take anything he said on trust. This is a pity, as presumably at least some of the songs -perhaps even the majority- that he published as noted from tradition were indeed genuine. Unfortunately, it is generally impossible to tell. This song is a case in point. It appeared in Songs of the Hill-Folk (1934, 8-9), as having been noted at Murphy, N. Carolina. I have not seen the book, but I gather from remarks made by others that no mention was made in it of Niles having written part of it himself. However, Niles himself wrote in 1958: "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. 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." The problem is not only that Niles appears to have passed off things he made up himself as traditional pieces, but that he also seems to have claimed traditional material as his own work. It is impossible to be sure where the boundaries lie. As it happens, a form of I Wonder As I Wander was noted by Frank C. Brown from an Obie Johnson at Crossmore, N. Carolina, in 1940; it was printed (text only) in North Carolina Folklore 3, 1952, 641-642. How close it was to the text Niles published I don't know. Equally, it's far from clear how much of the melody is his and how much derived from his presumed source. Roud lists only the Niles and Brown variants at present, at no. 15015. | ||
| Mary in Kentucky | Posted - 12 Oct 03 - 07:03 pm | |
Database updated. Thanks for all the information. Here are a couple of other links of interest: This one is from the John Jacob Niles Center which has several collections of his notes, diaries and music. And this one is about the Doris Ulmann special shown on PBS TV. (Some of her critics said that her photos were "staged.") Nevertheless, the photos documenting Appalachian life are beautiful, and this is a wonderful documentary. | ||