A Girl in Appalachia: “I Wonder As I Wander” sung by Theresa Donohoo

Photo: Joshua Strang

The plaintive song sounds like a folk carol passed down through the generations, but it was actually written by musician John Jacob Niles.

As Niles tells it, the song was inspired by a young girl in Murphy, North Carolina in 1933. Her father was a traveling preacher, and needed to do one more revival to have the money to move on.

But the police considered him a public nuisance and were ready to eject them.

A girl called Annie Morgan came out and sang the first three lines of this song. Niles paid her 25 cents each time she performed it, and after eight tries, Niles said, “…I had only three lines of verse, a garbled fragment of melodic material—and a magnificent idea.”

You can get Theresa Donohoo’s rendition of “I Wonder As I Wander” free from Freegal.