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

Foreword

Foreword Rick Kogan It was nearly twenty-five years ago, or possibly longer, that my childhood friend Ron Pen took me for a walk that carried me at once into another man’s life and into what would become Pen’s long-standing and determined and frustrating and now realized passion to put the life and times of John Jacob Niles between the covers of a book, this remarkable book. That day is so colorfully and lovingly and powerfully evoked in the first pages of this book—the gauzy sun, the carvings of “sacred icons and scriptures . . . intertwined with images of the native tobacco leaves and dogwood blossoms”—that not only was I instantly transported back a couple of decades, but I felt immediately compelled to devour every page that followed. Now, I am not one to be seduced by reading that “the early morning fog is pierced by the call of the brass horn and baying of the hounds as horses and riders pound wildly through fields,” though I have spent some enjoyably bucolic and whiskey-peppered nights on the Pen porch, behind the warm place that the author and his wife and daughter have called their Kentucky home for decades. I am a city kid, “Chicago born,” as novelist Saul Bellow put it at the opening of his masterpiece, The Adventures of Augie March, before adding , “[I] go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.” These words might serve also as apt description of Niles. Rena, his wife of forty-four years, pegs him precisely when she says, “He was strictly an individualist and he only operated successfully when he operated alone.” Well, he is no longer operating alone and hasn’t been ever since Pen first determined to take the measure of this complex and often contradictory man. xii Foreword Ron Pen too is Chicago born, and it seems to be a small miracle that he made his way to Niles country from an art-stuffed and music-filled house on Schiller Street, where he lived with his father, mother, and sister. It was in this place that his love for the arts and, indeed, for the unconventional was first planted and nurtured with sufficient love and care that it has lasted a lifetime. My great friend and mentor Studs Terkel was also a great pal and ardent admirer of Niles. Years before his death in 2008 he wrote his own epitaph: “Curiosity did not kill this cat.” And it has been curiosity that has fueled Pen’s passion. Niles once said, “Never let dull facts interfere with a good yarn.” This, of course, is not the sort of thing any biographer wants to hear, and Pen was wise not to heed those words. He has gathered an astonishing amount of research, of facts, and delivered them so clearly that he makes his subject’s life anything but dull. The facts are revelatory. They are entertaining and engaging. They are informative. They explain, definitively I dare say, the complexities of this American original and his great and ongoing and—almost certainly—everlasting influence. As you read this book, you should know that not every notable person gets the biographer he or she deserves. In Pen, Niles has the good fortune to have “found” a kindred soul—an admirer, to be sure, but one with great knowledge, a clear eye, a good ear (to be expected), and a stylish pen. It has been a long journey, and these two men have walked the same roads. They have shared the land and air and sun. They are tied now forever in words. Pen writes that Niles lies in a “pastoral graveyard, well shaded by walnut trees and graced by a serene pond,” but I beg to differ. Against all the laws of man and eternity, Pen has made Niles live again. He is here, alive in spirit and in words and in song. Listen! ...