I WONDER AS I WANDER

Music and Text: Appalachian carol
Adaptation: John Jacob Niles and Lewis Henry Horton
Arrangement: Mack Wilberg

The American folklorist John Jacob Niles was visiting the small rural community of Murphy, North Carolina, in the summer of 1933 when he heard a young girl, Annie Morgan, sing a fragment of a haunting melody in the town square. Its pensive, unaffected authenticity caught Niles’s ear, and he asked her to repeat it several times, paying her a quarter for each performance so he could learn it by rote. Niles later remembered, “I had only three lines of verse, a garbled fragment of melodic material— and a magnificent idea.” 

He completed the song later that year and published it soon after in 1934. “I Wonder as I Wander” quickly became a much-beloved Christmas carol worldwide.