Veld Vet

Nifty and haunting little songs from South Africa, sung for all that is in them, have made Josef Marais (pronounced Ma-ray) a favorite radio balladeer. Over an NBC-Blue network as usual last Sunday at 1:30 p.m. E.S.T. his program, African Trek, opened with a few bars of his theme song, Sarie Marais; but as a special treat this time he sang the whole thing first in Afrikaans, then in English. He could be sure of a bilingual audience, because for almost a year NBC has been sending his program by short wave to the Afrikanders of his native veld.

The occasion being Marais's 100th broadcast, there were other festal features. Marais fans, invited to attend, came in such numbers that NBC had to put on the show in its new, copper-lined theater. The Consul of the Union of South Africa came and testified that the "liedjies" (little songs) of Josef Marais brought back to him the "breath of the veld."

Born on the Karroo plateau near Cape Town 36 years ago, Josef Marais began as a child to collect the songs he heard the Hottentot farm boys sing. By the time he was 19 and a fiddler with the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra he had amassed a great fund of native and Boer folk songs. In 1930, in London, he sang a few for BBC, soon became a BBC standby. When NBC gave him a quarter-hour spot two years ago he got so much fan mail that his time was increased to a half-hour. One homesick South African informed him that he changed to hunting boots and shorts for every Marais broadcast.

Musicianly Josef Marais controls the timing and tone of his broadcast with the grace of a ballet master. A pleasant script takes him, two boon companions and a Hottentot boy on various African adventures that provide easy openings for such love songs as Here Am I, unique in its treatment of the adamantine mother theme, or such tender Boer campfire songs as Brandy, Leave Me Alone.

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