John Jacob Niles :
"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."
www.john-jacob-niles.com/music.htm
lyrics
I WONDER AS I WANDER (trad./J. Niles/arr. Gehrke)
I wonder as I wander out under the sky
How Jesus our Saviour did come for to die
For poor orn’ry people like you and like I
I wonder as I wander out under the sky
When Mary birthed Jesus 'twas in a cow stall
With wise men and farmers and shepherds and all
But high from the Heavens a star's light did fall
The promise of ages it then did recall
If Jesus had wanted of any wee thing
A star in the sky or a bird on the wing
Or all of God's Angels in Heav’n for to sing
He surely could have had it, 'cause he was the king
Songs accompanied by cinematic arrangements. A mix of traditional and new sounds from different musical cultures under a nice voice. Not your usual pop fare, I worked on this too. Rob Gehrke
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