Pierre Kartner, or "Vader Abraham" as he was known throughout much of the world in the 1970s and '80s, was a popular 1960s Europop musician who found a second, and much longer-lasting career as a fake Hasidic Jew who sang songs about the Smurfs. Yes, you heard me right. It all came together fairly suddenly in 1977, but Kartner knew enough not to stop a train. Here he is at the peak of his powers.


Vader Abraham began his post-pop career in the early 1970s writing alternately misty-eyed and goofy cafe songs that were popular with a Dutch mainstream culture looking for a way out of both 1960s radicalism and American-oriented rock. The name of his character was tied to his first single, a version of the traditional song "Father Abraham Had Seven Sons." Things went reasonably well for him for several years, but in 1977 he was asked to write a song for an animated move then in development called The Smurfs. After the single's first pressing of 1,000 copies sold out in a day, 900,000 more flew off the shelves, and the hit was rerecorded in German, French, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, and Japanese, with Kartner himself singing every version.

Vader Abraham became an international sensation, and released much of his music in English. He started his act with a fake beard, but then grew a real one, and has sported it ever since, and wholeheartedly and permanently adopted his role with a level of commitment and comfort Paul Reubens or other children's entertainers could never muster long-term.



Later decades saw surreal celebrations of his music, riding the wave of his immense popularity in the 1970s and the impact his music had on two generations of the Dutch: The middle-aged cafe-goers of the 1970s and the children they raised on his Smurfenland songs. Small countries that only occasionally export their pop culture to wild acclaim generally remain fond of them long after their time has passed, and it didn't hurt that there is something inescapably avuncular and familiar about a man who sings songs which often feature "la" as the most frequently used word.


Vader Abraham's connection with the Smurfs came to an end in the 1990s when he was left out of the revamped television series. He was, however, tapped to write the opening theme for another truly international cartoon, The Moomin, in one of its main animated incarnations. (I wrote recently about the Moomin in another Punnybop post.) If you doubted that Abraham's singsong was a signature style, listen to this and you'll realize you've just become an expert on the musical stylings of Pierre Kartner's second career.

- Jeremiah