For the past dozen years a South African balladeer named Josef Marais has been quietly building a reputation as a specialist in folk and children's songs. He and his Dutch wife Miranda accompany themselves—playing a guitar, tom-toms and an occasional native instrument, he chanting in English and Afrikaans, she piping a shy descant. But in the past year Minstrel Marais has turned popular songsmith. His songs of the veld, such as Sugarbush, Ay-round the Corner and the fast-rising Ma Says, Pa Says, have been recorded by such big-league songbirds as Jo Stafford and Doris Day.
The vogue of hillbilly and "country" tunes may have something to do with Marais' new popularity with the jukebox trade. But his songs have engaging, Calypso-style rhythms of their own, and turns of phrase in the lyrics (e.g., "How lovely cooks the meat") that never came from Tin Pan Alley.
In any case, the conversion from folk to pop comes quite easily to him. It is much the same as the process of "composing" one of his songs in the first place: all of them come from memories of the songs he heard as a youngster in the Cape Colony, and he and Miranda change them to suit themselves. "We are not the kind of folk singers who try to present the songs the way they were originally sung. We try to preserve the flavor, and then sing them the way we want to sing them."
Marais and Miranda sing a song called Chow, Willy which he reconstructed from a South African song about a rat, a mouse and a frog. Columbia Records' pop artists & repertory chief, Mitch Miller, decided it would be just the thing for Jo Stafford and Frankie Laine. Marais invented a man named Willy and changed the song's animals to people. "It would not be nice to bill Mr. Laine as a rat and Miss Stafford as a mouse," says Marais. Moreover, as Columbia Records could have told him, and perhaps did, the jukebox trade seldom gets excited about animal numbers.
Meanwhile, if U.S. listeners are determined to have "country" music, Marais will do his best to oblige. He has finished one original operetta called Tony Beaver, with a West Virginia hillbilly theme, and is on the last lap of another.