I discovered this song on a playlist of obscure music. I’m Scottish with German family so sometimes I think I can understand whole sentences but that’s not quite enough for this song. The parts I don’t understand weird me out because it sounds very familiar and I think I should. Anyway, any info on content or the band/artist would be great since I want to play it on my podcast and give some context to my listeners


4 comments

  1. It’s from a Dutch (trad) folk band (called Wolverlei) from the late seventies. They only had two records, the first was mainly traditional dutch folk songs, and they disbanded right after releasing their second album.

    This is their Dutch Wikipedia page, which you can translate to English to get mostly those details:

    https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolverlei_%28band%29

    I can’t listen to the song right now but later today I can transcribe the lyrics if you’d like. (or someone else will probably have done that by then).

  2. There’s a version of the lyrics here: https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/dekk033onde01_01/dekk033onde01_01_0027.php

    It’s somewhat odd and dialectic Dutch, but I think it boils down to this:

    So it’s about a man who sails his boat to Friesland to buy peat “turref”. When he gets there he meets a pretty girl who offers to sell him the peat she has in her shed for a low price. he follows her to the shed and she seduces him and they have much fun together for 3 or 4 hours.

    Then he tries give her a farewell kiss, she wants 6 more, and then the peat pile falls on them. He flees with his trousers and his purse on his back and hides behind a pile of peat from the girl’s father, but he is apparently fine with it.

    The song ends with the advice to young skippers to not follow peat-saleswomen into sheds, and to be quiet.

    And with the advice to horny peat saleswomen to not stumble around and make noise when with their lover, so that he does not flee, and her father is not alerted.

  4. It’s similar enough to still be quite easily understandable. There are a few words and expressions that we would need to look up to understand , change of pronoun use (jij/u instead of ge/gij) and a few grammatical differences (verb inflections, word order in some cases), but all in all I feel the change is similar to English from 1850 compared to now.
    Middle Dutch (1200-1500) is very different. I could discern general meaning but there are too many differences in both grammar and word use to read it easily.

    Don’t know any Dutch folk recommendations from the top of my head but will for sure post if I run into any!

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