Niles, John Jacob (1892–1980)

Composer, Song-catcher, and Musicologist

John Jacob Niles was the most important collector of songs sung by ordinary American doughboys during World War I. His father was a folksinger and square-dance caller, his mother a pianist and church organist.

Niles was raised in rural Kentucky, where he learned both the songs of ordinary people and the basics of music theory and composition. His first major composition, “Go ’Way from My Window,” was derived from words he had heard uttered by an African American hired hand on his father's farm. Another, “I Met Her in Venezuela,” was based on words he heard dockworkers in Boulogne chant during World War I. Later compositions, all containing fragments of folk music he had overheard, include “Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair” and “Jesus, Jesus, Rest Your Head.”

Niles's first published collection of folk music, arrangements of eight spirituals, was Impressions of a Negro Camp Meeting (1925). Others included Songs of the Hill Folk (1934) and The Ballad Book (1961). He toured the United States and Europe with contralto Marion Kerby from 1928 to 1933, performing folk songs and spirituals. He gave two solo performances at the White House. Niles made several recordings of folk songs for RCA Victor, and he also composed oratorios and cantatas, as well as the Niles Merton Songs 22, based on the poetry of Trappist monk Thomas Merton.

What makes Niles interesting within the context of war and society, however, are the two collections of songs that resulted from his service in France during World War I: Singing Soldiers (1927) and Songs My Mother Never Taught Me (1929). Niles had joined the aviation unit of the Army's Signal Corps in 1917 and, throughout the war, ferried planes from their delivery ports; he sometimes did aerial reconnaissance of enemy positions at the front. In December 1917, while in Paris, he came upon Theodore Botrel's Les Chants du Bivouac. Botrel had been commissioned by the French War Ministry to prepare and perform patriotic songs and poems for les poilus (French infantrymen) and was known as “Chansonnier des Armées.” Niles sat down at a piano in his hotel and, with the help of a French aviator, sampled Botrel's collection. He thereupon “decided to borrow M. Botrel's idea and attempt a collection of United States Army war songs” that would differ from Botrel's in being “as nearly as possible an unexpurgated record” of what the men were actually singing, songs that “revealed thoughts that would otherwise have died unspoken” (Niles 1927, vii, 13).

[Page 592]Niles soon found his ear drawn to the songs of African Americans more than to their white counterparts, since, as he said, “the imagination of the white boys did not, as a rule, express itself in song. They went to Broadway for their music, contenting themselves with the ready-made rhymes and tunes of the professional song-writers.” He “gave up recording the songs of white boys,” he said, and sought those who “sang the legend of the black man to tunes and harmonies they made up as they went along.” Black soldiers, Niles felt, were the only ones “who sang anything original.” The songs, he wrote, reminded him of “the haunting melodic value found in the negro music I had known as a boy in Kentucky,” and when the war ended, he set about soliciting additional songs from others, including W. H. Handy, “the ‘Blues’ authority” of his age (Niles 1927, vii–ix).

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