MODERN FOLK

25 years have now passed since the last broadcast of the Dutch radio presenter, Ate Doornbosch, who spent between 1957 to 1993 criss-crossing the Netherlands, recording men and women singing songs of their lives spent on islands, on farms or in fishing villages. These songs were collected in a 9-CD box set named after the radio program, ‘Onder de Groene Linden’ (Under the Green Linden Tree). I’ve spent the past weeks listening to these CDs, and it’s a strange sensation to hear these vivid, strong voices singing of a world that has now more or less disappeared. These songs do show how rapidly the Netherlands has changed just over the last 25-60 years. Many of the songs show the extreme class stratification that was then present: in them, many a poor young lad falls in love with a rich girl, or the other way around, and seldom does the story end well. The songs also come from a distinctly pre-Me Too society: songs matter-of-factly tell of the baby that is born 9 months after a girl goes out for a walk alone and comes across the wrong guy. Or of the young woman who, after begging her father to marry her handsome young suitor, finds no sympathy when her husband turns violent. Many of the occupations and backdrops mentioned in the stories are, of course, anachronistic: knights abound, robbers hide behind shrubs in the forests, counts and their offspring terrorize local villagers from horseback. But it is the attitudes towards social hierarchies, and in particular, the helplessness that individuals seemed to feel in the face of these hierarchies, that struck me as the most foreign aspect to life in the modern-day Netherlands.

You might ask, is it not then better to simply put these unhappy stories from more primitive times behind us? Shall we not just celebrate the fact that we are now better: more egalitarian, better able to safeguard the rights of each individual against the violent and more powerful? Recent threats to these rights aside, I do find it striking, and touching, that these freedoms that many people in the West now take as obvious were clearly not at all obvious just a generation or two back. The modern belief in equality and individual rights is the new kid on the block, and these songs, with their old stories of human power dynamics, sing of things that still lie in our short-term memory banks.

There are, of course, also cheerful songs to be found, and classic songs of love gained and lost outside of any social pressures. All of the songs from Ate Doornbosch’s CD collection are stored in the Dutch Liederenbank (the “Song Bank”) of the Meertens Instituut: http://www.liederenbank.nl/.