I Wonder as I Wander: The Life of John Jacob Niles

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as I Wander I Wonder T h e L I f e o f John Jacob Niles roN peN f o r e W o r d b y rick Kogan I Wonder as I Wander The Life of John Jacob Niles roN peN Foreword by Rick Kogan Louisville native John Jacob Niles (1892–1980) is considered one of the most influential songwriters and balladeers of the American folk music tradition. As a music collector he was especially interested in documenting the voices of his fellow World War I soldiers, the ballads of Appalachia, and the spirituals of African Americans. Niles composed and arranged nearly a thousand songs during his lifetime, but often his artistic performance style was disparaged by academic critics, who characterized him as a singer of folk songs rather than a folksinger. I Wonder as I Wander: The Life of John Jacob Niles, the first full-length biography of the “Dean of American Balladeers,” offers a rich portrait of the musician’s character and career. Ron Pen uses Niles’s own accounts, drawn from his journals, notebooks, and unpublished autobiography, to track his rise from farm boy to composer and folklorist. At the age of sixteen, Niles wrote one of his most famous tunes, “Go ’Way from My Window,” basing it on a song fragment from a farm worker. This iconic song is said to have inspired the first line in Bob Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me Babe” and has been performed by a variety of artists since. In the 1920s Niles collaborated with noted photographer Doris Ulmann during trips to Appalachia, where he transcribed, adapted, and arranged traditional songs and ballads such as “Pretty Polly” and “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair.” He drew from a deep well of traditional folk songs for his creative performances on stage, and his theatrical use of the dulcimer is credited with contributing to the popularity of the instrument today. Though he was committed to the presentation and preservation of folk music, Niles was also deeply interested in art music composition. Still considered important additions to art song literature today, Niles’s compositions included an oratorio, Lamentation, and a series of “Niles-Merton” songs, based on the poems of Thomas Merton. Niles’s dedication to the folk music tradition lives on in generations of folk revival artists such as Jean Ritchie, Joan Baez, and Oscar Brand. I Wonder as I Wander chronicles the efforts of a man committed to the tradition of folk music and Appalachian culture, exploring the origins and influences of the American folk music resurgence of the 1950s and 1960s and revealing the charismatic man at the forefront. ron pen is associate professor of music at the University of Kentucky, where he serves as director of the John Jacob Niles Center for American Music and the Appalachian Studies Program. He is the editor of The Ballad Book of John Jacob Niles and is also active as an oldtime fiddler and a shape note singer. continued on back flap continued from front flap MUSIC / BIOGRAPHY / REGIONAL “A gracefully written biography of a performing artist, composer, and folklore collector who was a powerful cultural force in twentieth-century America.”—Alan Jabbour, founding director of the American Folklife Center “Niles was nontraditional, but he sang traditional songs. A Mephistophelean character out of Carolina, he hammered away at some harplike instrument and sang in a bone chilling soprano voice. Niles was eerie and illogical, terrifically intense and gave you goosebumps. Definitely a switched-on character, almost like a sorcerer. Niles was otherworldly and his voice raged with strange incantations. I listened to ‘Maid Freed from the Gallows’ and ‘Go Away from My Window’ plenty of times.”—bob dylan, from Chronicles: Volume One “As I first listened to his haunting falsetto on an old Victor 78, I was hearing, it seemed, an Elizabethan minstrel offering a medieval carol. It was, in fact, something John Jacob Niles wrote in the 1930s. He is a writer, singer, and collector of folk songs. His style of speech is that of an old-time schoolmaster lecturing a group of enraptured though at times unruly students. In moments of fervor, his mode may be that of W. C. Fields, a circuit-riding evangelist, or an oldtime medicine man. His ebullience overwhelms.”—Studs Terkel, from And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey The University Press of Kentucky Kentucky peN I Wonder as I Wander The LIfe of John Jacob Niles...