ABSTRACT
An adversary of American influences in popular music—ragtime sheet music was imported the 1890s—Jan van Laar shunned the mass media that came into being during his lifetime, from commercially produced records to radio and sound film as promotional tools for singers and songs. Between 1872 and 1934 the Red Star Line company had taken 150,000 Belgian immigrants to the United States, while the Holland America Line brought a quarter million Dutch. Bing Crosby's musical director Jimmy Grier came up with the idea of the sound of windmills turning at the intro. In the summer of 1935 a lively Tin Pan Alley waltz song about romance under the sails of a windmill somewhere in imagined unspoiled rural Holland became a nationwide hit. The trend sensitive and identity conscious Andre Rieu Orchestra took the tune around the world as part of its medley of classics made in Holland.
