Jordaanlied

The Jordaanlied ("Jordaan song") is a type of levenslied, the Dutch genre of nostalgic sentimental popular music; the Jordaanlied hails from and sings the praises of the Amsterdam neighborhood the Jordaan which, until the 1960s, was an impoverished working-class area. The genre first came to the fore in the late 19th century and reached extraordinary popularity in the 1950s, before becoming old-fashioned quickly when rock and roll came along. It continues to be sung in the now-yuppified Jordaan, as a local favorite and a tourist attraction in a profoundly changed neighborhood; already a nostalgic genre when it was first made popular, the situations it describes and the emotions it evokes are no longer directly accessible even by the older generations, a transformation due in part to the Jordaanlied itself.

The first Jordaanlied, according to cabaret artist and historian Jacques Klöters, dates from 1897, and is a song called "Pietje Puck". The genre helped initiate and later perpetuate a myth of the Jordaan, Klöters argued, a myth of a world full of poor, hard-working, and fun-loving people who adhere to traditional values.

A second wave of popularity came during and after World War I, and was prompted by the work of Dutch writer Israël Querido, who had written a four-volume novel De Jordaan. A play inspired by Querido's characterization of Jordaners, as "hard workers, hard drinkers, working under terrible conditions and having their emotions only just below the surface", was a big hit: Herman Boubers' Mooie Neel (1916) was the story of a factory girl who is seduced by her boss and left with the consequences. Boubers wrote a second play, this time with songs written in collaboration with Louis Davids, one of the greatest artists in cabaret in the Netherlands, whom Boubers had met by chance in a cafe on the Rembrandtplein, one of the city's main entertainment areas. Davids composed a number of Jordaan-themed songs (though he was a Rotterdammer) with his then-girlfriend, the English singer and actress Margie Morris, for the enormously popular Bleeke Bet (1917) which had the Jordaan as background and topic. One of the play's songs, "O oude mooie toren", later specified as "O mooie Westertoren", became the area's first "anthem".

Boubers followed the overwhelming success of Bleeke Bet with more of the same, including songs by Davids and Morris; Oranje Hein (1919) and De Jantjes (1920) were just as successful and made him a rich man (he bought himself a motorboat called De Jantjes). In the 1930s, with the advent of cinema, his plays were made into films; singer Johan Heester and actress Fien de la Mar were the most popular stars of the time, and practically every successful Dutch movie of the era was set in Amsterdam, a theme continued until the outbreak of World War II. According to Henk van Gelder, popular Dutch sentiment seemed to identify completely with Amsterdam and especially de Jordaan.

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