Watch Broadway star Michael Maliakel perform "I Wonder as I Wander," with The Tabernacle Orchestra.

He completed the song later that year and published it soon after in 1934. “I Wonder as I Wander” quickly became a much-beloved Christmas carol worldwide.

Niles was in Appalachia in 1933 when Annie Morgan sang fragments of a song: “I wonder as I wander, out under the sky, how Jesus the Savior did come for to die …” ...