Author: Max Brzezinski
Most Christmas carols are direct delivery mechanisms for holiday cheer. Their tranquil tones and pleasant melodies, usually sung in unison, create a peaceful and joyous mood. In carol-land, all is “calm and bright.”
But the most famous Christmas carol to come out of North Carolina, “I Wonder as I Wander,” born in Murphy, Cherokee County, 1933, is different and more mysterious. It asks questions rather than provides answers, and mingles a wintry sorrow in with its consolation, counterpoising the Great Depression’s immiseration of “poor on’ry people” with Jesus’s utopian “promise of the ages.” It’s the opposite of the laughing dash of the sleigh in “Jingle Bells”: a moody maunder with no clear destination in sight, it’s the spookiest of Christmas carols.
Yet “I Wonder as I Wander” has travelled far and wide since its genesis in the early Thirties: a popular arrangement by composer Benjamin Britten, a well-distributed recording by Burl Ives, and the song’s use by everyone from church choirs and Langston Hughes to Barbra Streisand and Vanessa Williams have spread this eeriest of Christmas carols around the globe. What accounts for its staying power in this the most wonderful time of the year?
We’d say it’s there in the North Carolina beginnings of “I Wonder as I Wander.” The mysterious questioning of this folk hymn, born of the collision of contradictions, was present at its genesis, when middle-class Kentuckian collector John Jacob Niles met a girl named Annie Morgan in Murphy, NC, Cherokee County. Morgan and her family were itinerant evangelicals, and when Niles met her the Morgans had already been ordered out of town by the police. The way Niles tells it:
A girl had stepped out to the edge of the little platform attached to the automobile. She began to sing. Her clothes were unbelievably dirty and ragged, and she, too, was unwashed. Her ash-blond hair hung down in long skeins. ... But, best of all, she was beautiful, and in her untutored way, she could sing. She smiled as she sang, smiled rather sadly, and sang only a single line of a song.
In his autobiography, Niles goes on to say he had Murphy sing the line 7 times, for a quarter each go (roughly $40 today) and came away with “three lines of verse, a garbled fragment of melodic material—and a magnificent idea.” This was October 1933. By December of that year, “I Wonder as I Wander” was completed and debuted by Niles at John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, NC. The next year, Niles published the composition in Songs of the Hill Folk. In subsequent years, he fought in court to defend his copyright to the song, alongside his other well-known compositions “Black Is the Color” and “‘Go Way From My Window” (the latter which provided Bob Dylan the first line to “It Ain’t Me Babe.”)
The mystery of “I Wonder as I Wander,” its blending of dirt and beauty, then, began before it was completed, with the figure Annie Morgan in Western North Carolina: what strikes Niles most about her is her “unwashed” beauty, and she smiles while she sings her somewhat mournful song. The song endures because Niles not only built the song around Morgan’s initial idea, but also because the finished composition is about her, and about the experience of poverty in North Carolina during the Great Depression.
It speaks to an experience Niles could not capture by himself – the song remains so powerful because it both channels Morgan’s experience (through her own words and melody), and is a description of her effect on Niles, her “ragged” and “untutored” musical ability, experience, and appearance. The mystery that comes from the song comes from the doubleness of it, the sense that you are hearing something with multiple levels at work at once.
In the finished version of “I Wonder as I Wander,” you are listening to a conversation (some might say a monologue) Niles is having with the ghostly presence of Morgan, her original words, and melody. It’s been noted that this folk hymn meditates on a familiar subject, the true nature of spirituality, and the paradox of the son of God coming to earth as a humble man (socioeconomically speaking). But it is also a song about its original author, Annie Morgan, and the song she began during hard times in 1930s Murphy, North Carolina. It both starts from her words and melody, and reflects on her as its hidden subject, as the inspiration for its famous figure of “poor on’ry people” who ponder the “promise of the ages.”
Learn More:
Niles, John Jacob. Songs of the Hill-Folk: Twelve Ballads from Kentucky, Virginia, and North Carolina. New York: G. Schirmer, 1934.
Pen, Ron. I Wonder as I Wander: The Life of John Jacob Niles. Louisville: University of Kentucky Press, 2010.
“I Wonder as I Wander,” BBC Sounds Documentary, original air date December 22, 2021.
Image: “John Jacob Niles and Virginia Howard with an Appalachian Dulcimer,” circa 1933, The Doris Ullmann Collection at University of Oregon, public domain.