Who Wrote the Song?
Today, who wrote the song? The University of Houston presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
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Here are four widely sung songs:
Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair
Go ‘Way from My Window
I Wonder as I Wander
Venezuela
Who wrote them? Go to the internet and all get labeled as Traditional. Yet each of these songs, as we now know and sing it, was the work of one person: John Jacob Niles.
OK, a parallel question: Who invented the airplane? Easy to say, The Wright Brothers. They built on countless earlier inventors. Niles likewise brought to fulfillment, old fragments of words and music. Yet history points to the Wrights while it ignores Niles.
So let us trace Niles’s history: After he’d served as a flyer in World War One, he stayed on to study music in Paris’s Schola Cantorum. More musical studies back in America. Then he sang opera in Chicago. There, he decided he didn’t have the right voice for major roles ... So ...
He and his wife Rena moved back to his home state of Kentucky. There they ventured into the backwoods with score-paper and pen, to find people singing songs that were generally unknown. Niles then wove fragments of music and fragments of text into finished songs.
Niles and his dulcimer in Appalachia (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
I’ll attach a lengthy video in which his widow documents that work. She also complains about how Niles was leap-frogged – how others used his songs and attributed them to “Traditional”. As though they are singing original folk music rather than finished compositions derived from those fragments.
An older John Jacob and Rena Niles collaborating (Image courtesy of University of Kentucky Archives/John Jacob Niles Collection)
Another of Niles’s songs took a different route. You’ve likely heard, “I Am a Poor Wayfaring Stranger.” It’d been sung, in various forms, during the nineteenth century. Today we hear it in a finished form. Who gave it that form? Niles, of course. Every version I find is based on his canonical setting.
The irony here: Niles based his compositions on found fragments of forgotten tunes, with songs of his own thrown in. Now those finished and popular songs – those original compositions – are again credited to that non-person: “Traditional.”
The folk singer Richard Dyer-Bennet sings Niles's "Black is the Color" beautifully. But he first takes pains to tell us it was once sung in England, but is now found only in America. Never mind that both the tune and words are Niles’s.
(Music - Black is the Color of My True Love's Hair)
So what is fair here? I can only say that, when I first heard Niles singing in person, back in 1949, I knew I was privileged to’ve heard something very special. And I am personally pained to see him, and all that he gave us, now as anonymous as those who first sang the fragments that moved him to write for us.
I’m John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we’re interested in the way inventive minds work.
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Here is an Engines episode about Niles that I did many years ago. It includes additional information about him: John Jacob Niles | The Engines of Our Ingenuity
Video of Rena Niles recounting the history of John Jacob Niles: Here she describes the process by which Niles built original songs from fragments.
Here you may hear Richard Dyer-Bennet attributing Niles’s version of Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair to long-ago England. (It is a lovely rendition, despite his introduction.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uf4np3fU_uE
This is the first page of Niles’s familiar setting of Wayfaring Stranger. The versions I hear today derive from this setting.
One of Niles’s well-known songs was his own composition with no folk antecedents: “Go ‘Way from My Window” It is interesting for the way in which it has the same basic sound as his “folk” songs do.
This episode first aired on September 7, 2026.