We are more than a third of the way through Advent this year and the week began with the Second Sunday of Advent (Advent II, 7 December 2025). At noon each day this Advent, I am offering one image as part of my ‘Advent Calendar’ for 2025, and one Advent or Christmas carol, hymn or song.
As I am speaking about the work of the architect Edward Swinfen Harris to the Wolverton and District Archaeological and Historical Society in Stony Stratford Library this afternoon (2:30, 9 December 2025), my choice of Advent Calendar images today come from the Swinfen Harris Church Hall, beside the Greek Orthodox Church in Stony Stratford. And my choice of an Advent hymn or carol today is ‘I Wonder as I Wander’, one of the carols or hymns the Choir in Saint Mary and Saint Giles Church in Stony Stratford is rehearsing this Advent.
This folk hymn that has its origins in a song fragment collected in 1933 by the American folklorist and singer John Jacob Niles (1892-1980). He was known as the ‘Dean of American Balladeers,’ and had an important influence on the American folk music revival in the 1950s and 1960s, with Odetta, Joan Baez, Burl Ives, Peter, Paul and Mary, Bob Dylan and many others recording his songs.
While Niles was in the town of Murphy in Appalachian North Carolina, he attended a fundraising meeting held by travelling evangelists who had been driven out of town by the police, and heard this song sung by Annie Morgan.
She repeated the fragment seven times in exchange for a quarter for each performance, and Niles left with ‘three lines of verse, a garbled fragment of melodic material – and a magnificent idea.’ Based on this fragment, Niles composed ‘I Wonder as I Wander’, and then extended the melody to four lines and the lyrics to three stanzas. He completed his composition on 4 October 1933 and first performed the song on 19 December 1933 in Brasstown, North Carolina. It was first published in 1934.
Barbra Streisand sang it on A Christmas Album (1967), and other recordings are by Mary Travers of Peter, Paul, and Mary, Vanessa Williams, the BBC Symphony Chorus, the Cambridge Singers and the Choir of Eton College.
Ian Bradley, Emeritus Professor of Cultural and Spiritual History at the University of St Andrews, the ‘clean, haunting melody … maintains the open-air atmosphere and sense of wistful wandering conjured up in the first line.’
Benjamin Britten published a setting of the song in 1934, and other arrangements have been written by Luciano Berio and by Carl Rütti for the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. The choir in Saint Mary and Saint Giles in Stony Stratford is rehearsing the arrangement by John Rutter, first written for the Cambridge Singers.
I wonder as I wander out under the sky,
How Jesus, the Saviour, did come for to die.
For poor ornery people like you and like I:
I wonder as I wander, Out under the sky.
When Mary birthed Jesus, ’twas in a cow’s stall,
With wise men and farmers and shepherd and all.
But high from God’s heaven a star’s light did fall,
And the promise of ages it did then recall.
If Jesus had wanted for any wee thing:
A star in the sky, or a bird on the wing;
Or all of God’s angels in heaven to sing,
He surely could have had it, ’cause he was the King!
I wonder as I wander out under the sky,
How Jesus, the Saviour, did come for to die.
For poor ornery people like you and like I:
I wonder as I wander Out under the sky.
No comments:
Post a Comment