Under The Green Linden

Description

In 1957 Dutch radio producer Ate Doornbosch introduced a radio show called ‘Under the Green Linden’ on a socialist station that wanted to contribute to the cultural elevation of the people by broadcasting folk songs. Doornbosch, born in 1926, wanted to make a series of ten programs with recordings of old songs. The directors at first thought that was a bit too
much, perhaps five installments would be plenty, but Doornbosch stood his ground. Eventually there would be more than 1300 broadcasts.

The first authentic voice he recorded was his wife’s grandmother, who hailed from one of the northern provinces. When the program ended in 1993 more than 5000 songs and versions were recorded by Doornbosch all over The Netherlands. During this period he started to work for the Amsterdam University as well, making transcriptions and -more and more- studying the music and songs as part of the social background of the many singers.

Five years ago a group of students were invited to make a selection out of the now digitalised collection, aptly named the ‘Under the Green Linden’ collection, based on the ‘Ballad Type Index’, created by European folk song experts. After many hours of listening the first selection was presented to Prof. Grijp and Ate Doornbosch. It took a lot of thinking and refining to come to the final selection of the 163 songs presented in this monumental set.

The tracks were not only selected to fit into the Ballad Index’s themes, but also on the quality of the amateur singers, on the completeness of the lyrics and a good representation of all parts of the country. In the meantime two documentaries were traced in the television archives: one in black and white from 1964 and a more recent one from 1984. These documentaries, presented on the accompanying dvd, show how Ate Doornbosch collected the songs. The dvd also contains the last radio show.

After the final selection was made all songs were transcribed, annotated and accompanied by a preface, history, indices on singers and song titles, pictures, etc. For the international audience the entire edition, including the dvd, has been translated into English as well. The result is a 440 page book in two languages and two colours plus a disc sleeve containing the 9 cds and the dvd, all packaged into a slipcase. The beautiful design matches the magnitude of this very special edition and is a wonderful celebration of Music & Words’ 25th anniversary The complete set ‘Under the Green Linden’ has no equal, Topic Records’ ‘The
Voice of the People’ or Smithsonian Folkways’ ‘Anthology of Folk Music’ are closest. The
picture below gives a modest idea of this unique project.

163 tracks