Confederacy of a Dunce - The singer without a name

Friday, September 08, 2006

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Last weekend we made a visit to Leiden, another very pleasant stop in the Lowlands (I have to mention the fabulous restaurant Mrs. Dunce took me to for my birthday, Restaurant Wessels. We arrived at 8pm and were the last party seated, and the food was just fantastic. I wish I had a little more time to write about it). A few discreetly placed signs indicate to the especially observant visitor that Rembrandt may have some connection to Leiden (alternatively, the whole town shouts REMBRANDT! REMBRANDT! REMBRANDT! until it's blue in the face). We did stop by a few locations on the Rembrandt trail, but spent a lot of our time wondering "Just who is the nameless singer?". You see, the entrance to our hotel room was decorated with a sort of shrine to the Zangeres Zonder Naam made up of assorted album covers and a few baubles:

(Google Images also gives a good impression of the album covers on display, minus the baubles, here). I was quite curious about the Zangeres, who'd obviously been highly prolific over many years, but who was totally unfamiliar to me. No surprise that a search turned up zillions of sites, almost all of them in Dutch.

Perhaps the curious visitor's first stop should be the Zangeres's official website She might have departed this earth but her songs live on. Prepare to be dazzled (and see if you recognize the song). Some additional clips are linked from a (Dutch) article about "twelve great stories from Leiden" (article HERE): Vaderlief, Kinderogen, Costa del Sol, Mexico. The Zangeres specialized in over-the-top sentimentality, songs of a type known as smartlap, "a simple, sentimental song, sang in Dutch, where melancholy, homesickness and deeply-rooted sorrow are the central themes. The term originates from 'stoplap', a cliché which lost its strength., and 'smart' which means 'grief' (quotes taken from this informative article), and also levenslied (literally "life songs", which are like the smartlappen but not necessarily sad).

A bit more biographical information (in Dutch) is available back at her official website HERE. Here's a summary: born in 1919 (named Maria "Rietje" Bey), spent years of her childhood abed in hospital before going to work in the wool factory at 14. She was discovered by "talentscout" Johnny Hoes (who wrote many of the songs she performed) in 1957 and took on her stage name. Her first hit (reaching the Dutch top ten) was in 1959, "Ach Vaderlief, Toe Drink Niet Meer" ("Oh dear father, don't drink any more", or something like that). And she kept cranking them out, (all song titles are attempted English translations by me; maybe I do better than Babelfish) The Beggar of Paris (staying in the charts for 7 months in 1961, The Blind Soldier, The Girl from the Street, The Rag-picker of Paris, you get the idea. And she just kept going, occasional doldrums but on through the 1970s. In 1980 there was one of those typical record company situations (I'm glossing over it in this manner so I don't have to decipher the Dutch) which seems to have resulted in the Zangeres no longer receiving any royalties from her previous recordings. She kept on going, until a farewell concert in 1987 (although "best-of" albums continued to be released after that). Coaxed out of retirement she recorded an album in 1993 (proceeds going to charity), and she died in 1998 (a commemorative box set was released; it's unclear from the biographical article whether it actually contained all 550! songs she recorded). Sadly we missed the 2000 exhibition in Leiden's Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal "Van Rembrandt tot de Zangeres zonder Naam" (From Rembrandt to the Singer Without A Name).

So there you have it, she was a local star!

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Friday, September 08, 2006 1:31:38 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)