I Wonder as I Wander: The Life of John Jacob Niles (review)

John Jacob Niles was one of those liminal characters so often found throughout the history of American music, difficult to define in academic terms and almost as difficult to pin down as a personality. Probably best known today as the composer of the Christmas song "I Wonder as I Wander," Niles was a true polymath: singer, composer, arranger, writer, raconteur, performer, aviator, inventor, farmer, ballad hunter, and entrepreneur. An inspiration to musicians as diverse as Eleanor Steber, Arnold Schoenberg, and Bob Dylan, Niles inhabited a musical space that was certainly "beyond category." As Dylan remarked in his own memoirs (quoted by Pen): "Niles was non-traditional, but he sang traditional songs. A Mephistophelean character out of Carolina [sic], 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" (p. 281). Ron Pen's long-awaited, engagingly written, and well-researched biography is as close as we are likely to come in beginning to understand this eccentric, exasperating, influential, and immensely gifted individual.

Pen, a professor of music and director of the John Jacob Niles Center for American Music at the University of Kentucky, is certainly well placed to utilize the plethora of sources documenting Niles's life and work. He has been involved with this subject for some twenty years of his own life and his efforts have paid off mightily. He proves himself to be a scrupulous scholar, demonstrating a wonderful ability to craft a clearly written, interesting narrative out of a huge number of disparate manuscripts, publications, and other sources. And the University Press of Kentucky should be congratulated in producing a well-made, attractive volume with full scholarly apparatus and (mostly) excellent plates and illustrations.

Born in Kentucky, the state where he lived most of his life, John Jacob Niles began his musical training early, and by his teens he had already developed interests in both classical and folk repertories. During this time he began collecting folk songs from traditional singers in his state, and by his early twenties had covered quite a bit of the eastern part of Kentucky. Without recording equipment, Niles was forced to transcribe by hand the songs he heard. However, Niles was always interested in making his transcriptions performable in a modern setting, more often than not providing accompaniments and melodic variations that sometimes made the songs into more his own compositions than into an accurate representation of his informants' performances. Pen details the fact that this has engendered criticism from folklorists and ethnomusicologists, but was not able, in a narrative such as this, to explore this issue in a philosophically detailed way. I do not criticize him for this, but mention it only in the hope of spurring more discussion on the issue for future critics and researchers.

Indeed, the issue of representing other cultures is something with which anthropology and ethnomusicology, as fields, have always struggled, and a more detailed case study of a figure like Niles would be very welcome. Niles's approach was not scientific but artistic, and the story of his most famous song, "I Wonder as I Wander," is a case in point. In one of his later field trips to North Carolina with photographer Doris Ulmann, Niles happened upon Annie Morgan, the young daughter of an itinerant preacher, singing a song, "the burden [of which] had to do with wandering and wondering and the reasons for Christ's birth and death" (p. 150). The performance was a halting affair, with Niles throwing coins to the girl and her father egging her on to continue singing. In the end, Niles reports that he "went on paying for a single sentence of words and music for eight times" (p. 151), never fully recording the complete song. By the next morning the girl and her family were gone.

Pen writes that Niles, as...