If you only learn a handful of Dutch folk songs, make it these nine: the Wilhelmus, Merck toch hoe sterck, Wilt heden nu treden, Heer Halewijn, Het daghet in den Oosten, Daar was laatst een meisje loos, Altijd is Kortjakje ziek, Heb je wel gehoord van de zevensprong and Zie ginds komt de stoomboot. Together they cover almost every corner of the tradition: medieval ballads, war songs from the Dutch Revolt, sailors' tales, playground dances and the seasonal songs children still sing every November.
Most of them are anonymous, and most survived because people kept singing them long before anyone wrote them down. That is also why the stories behind them are often stranger than the tunes suggest. Below is what each song is about, where it comes from, and why it is still sung.
Songs of the Dutch Revolt
1. Het Wilhelmus
The Dutch national anthem began life as a partisan song for William of Orange during the Eighty Years' War. Its text was written some time between 1568 and 1572 and is first recorded in 1573, during the siege of Haarlem. The fifteen stanzas form an acrostic: their first letters spell Willem van Nassov. Nobody knows for certain who wrote it; Philips of Marnix and Dirck Coornhert have both been named, but neither ever claimed it.
The melody has an ironic origin. It was borrowed from a French Catholic song that mocked a Protestant prince's failed siege of Chartres in 1568, and the Dutch turned that mockery into a tribute to their own Protestant prince. The Wilhelmus only became the official national anthem on 10 May 1932, yet because its melody and lyrics have stayed together since the 1570s it is often described as the oldest national anthem in use. On official occasions usually just the first stanza is sung, sometimes followed by the sixth.
2. Merck toch hoe sterck
This is the best known of the geuzenliederen, the songs of the Dutch rebels against Spain. It celebrates the relief of Bergen op Zoom on 2 October 1622, after a siege of about three months. It was printed in 1626 in Adriaen Valerius's songbook Nederlandtsche Gedenck-clanck, which paired patriotic texts with popular tunes of the day.
The tune is not Dutch at all. Valerius marked it as the Comedianten dans, which points to the English lute song What if a day, or a month, or a year, credited to Thomas Campion and printed in 1606. A battle song on an English lute melody is a good reminder of how freely music crossed the North Sea, much as the oud and the European lute once crossed the Mediterranean. Today the text is shown on the Beursplein in Bergen op Zoom.
3. Wilt heden nu treden
Valerius's collection also contains Wilt heden nu treden, a song of thanksgiving usually linked to the Dutch victory at Turnhout in 1597. It appeared in print in 1626, a year after Valerius died. In 1877 the Austrian choral conductor Eduard Kremser arranged it with Latin and German words, and in 1894 Theodore Baker wrote the English text that turned it into We Gather Together. In the United States it is now a familiar Thanksgiving hymn, so millions of people sing a Dutch rebel song every November without realising it. Like other songs born in times of resistance, it outlived the conflict that produced it.
Medieval ballads
4. Heer Halewijn
One of the oldest stories in Dutch song is also one of the darkest. Lord Halewijn sings a song so seductive that every young woman who hears it goes to him in the forest, and none returns. A princess goes anyway, keeps her nerve when he means to kill her, and turns the tables: she beheads him with his own sword and carries his head home to a feast. The ballad survived mainly by word of mouth before 19th-century collectors printed it. It belongs to a family of European ballads that includes the English Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight, and the story is often compared with Bluebeard.
5. Het daghet in den Oosten
"It dawns in the east" opens one of the most beautiful medieval Dutch songs. A young woman waits for her lover at daybreak, but a different suitor arrives with the news that her beloved lies dead under the green linden tree. When her father and the lords around him refuse to help give him a proper burial, she buries him herself and enters a convent. The song was printed in the Antwerps liedboek of 1544, which already called it an "old song", so it was clearly circulating orally long before then. It belongs to the same long history traced in our piece on Dutch music in the Renaissance and Baroque.
Sailors, drinkers and dancers
6. Daar was laatst een meisje loos
Today it is a cheerful children's song about a girl who wants to go to sea as a lichtmatroos, a junior sailor. The full version is far less innocent. It reflects something that really happened in the 17th and 18th centuries: women who disguised themselves as men to sign on as sailors or soldiers, and archives of the Dutch Republic record dozens of such cases. In the song the girl's disguise is discovered, and the later verses (eleven in the longest versions) end with a baby and a plea for her mother's forgiveness. The song was first documented in 1775, and 19th-century editors quietly left out the rougher verses.
7. Altijd is Kortjakje ziek
Most English speakers already know this melody: it is the French tune Ah! vous dirai-je, maman, the same one used for Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. The Dutch words are older than their nursery-rhyme reputation. A broadsheet from around 1700 already carries an ancestor of the song, a comic piece about a gin-loving woman who is "always sick" in the middle of the week but never on Sunday. Over time the drinking jokes fell away and only the teasing refrain survived in the version children learn now.
8. Heb je wel gehoord van de zevensprong
The zevensprong ("seven jump") is a circle dance song. Each time the refrain comes round, the dancers count one step further, from one to seven, adding a new move or pose each time, so the song becomes a memory game as well as a dance. Its oldest printed version appears in J. van Vloten's 1871 collection of Dutch nursery rhymes, where it is labelled a dance song, and handwritten collections from around 1900 describe the steps. It is still a staple at schools and folk-dance evenings.
A seasonal favourite
9. Zie ginds komt de stoomboot
Every mid-November, roughly three weeks before Sinterklaas on 6 December, Dutch and Flemish children greet his arrival with songs, and Zie ginds komt de stoomboot ("Look, over there comes the steamboat") is the one almost everyone knows. Its words come from Sint Nikolaas en zijn knecht, an 1850 children's book by the Amsterdam schoolteacher Jan Schenkman. That little book was the first to put several now-familiar details in print: the saint arriving by steamboat, coming from Spain, and travelling with a servant, the figure that later became the much-debated Zwarte Piet. The words were set to the German folk tune Im Märzen der Bauer in 1912.
What these songs have in common
Read together, these nine songs show how the Dutch tradition works. Tunes travel freely: French, English and German melodies were adopted without hesitation, and a Dutch hymn travelled to America in return. Texts change with their audience, so bawdy street songs became nursery rhymes and partisan songs became national symbols. And very little depends on a named composer; the songs belong to whoever sings them. For the wider picture of how this tradition faded and revived, see our guide to the hidden tradition of Dutch folk music, and for songs in the country's second official language, the songs of Friesland.
Where to look up and hear them
The best free resource is the Nederlandse Liederenbank of the Meertens Instituut, a research database with records of more than 180,000 Dutch songs from the Middle Ages onwards. It also draws on recordings made for the radio programme Onder de Groene Linde, so you can often find versions sung by ordinary people rather than polished choirs. For the revolt-era songs, look for recordings of Valerius's Gedenck-clanck; for the medieval ballads, early-music ensembles that perform songs from the Antwerps liedboek.
FAQ
What is the oldest Dutch folk song?
No single song can be proven oldest, but medieval ballads such as Heer Halewijn and Het daghet in den Oosten are among the oldest still known. The Wilhelmus, from around 1570, is the oldest that is still widely sung today.
Is Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star a Dutch song?
No. The melody is French and was published in 1761. The Dutch simply have their own words for it, Altijd is Kortjakje ziek.
Are these songs free to sing and perform?
The traditional melodies and old texts are centuries old and in the public domain. Modern arrangements, translations and recordings can still be protected, so check the specific edition you use.
Sources: Meertens Instituut, Nederlandse Liederenbank; Wikipedia articles on the Wilhelmus, We Gather Together, Merck toch hoe sterck, Heer Halewijn, Het daghet in den oosten, Daar was laatst een meisje loos, Altijd is Kortjakje ziek, Zevensprong and Sinterklaaslied (consulted October 2026).