Folk singer Stef Ekkel calls Karst’s death ‘bizarre’ and ‘unreal’. Ekkel: “And still so young. 59 years old, fully engaged in life. Success in music, a beautiful family, a proud grandfather. And then suddenly taken away from life.”
As a singer you live from the music, says Ekkel. “René did that too. You try to achieve success and you should always be allowed to do so. And René has been doing well in recent years,” says the folk singer. “And he was very happy and proud of that.”
The two were good friends. “We were already friends before we wrote the song Rather too thick in the box “, Ekkel looks back. “René once described our friendship very nicely. He said: even if you are standing on the A50 in the middle of the night with a flat tire and you call, I will come. That would also have been the case the other way around. He is in my heart and he always will be.”
Anton Geerts, from party duo the Dikdakkers, heard the news early this morning from his management. “I got a kind of goosebumps feeling,” he explains. “It really warmed me up. It’s unreal.”
“We are all Drenthe, but he is also very well-known and important for the whole of the Netherlands,” says Geerts. According to Geerts, the fact that Karst is so loved by many is partly because he was a modest man. “When we come on stage with the Dikdakkers, it is with a lot of fanfare, and that was not the case with René. He is still that troubadour with the guitar.”
Karst wrote the World Cup song For Gold With Orange for the Dikdakkers. Three days after the song was released, the Women’s Orange team was celebrating their victory on that song. “60 thousand people were singing along, a brilliant idea,” Geerts compliments. “He just pulled that out of his Hoogeveen hat.”
“This is not normal,” says folk singer Marco Schuitmaker. “You won’t believe it.” When he opened his phone this morning he received a video of him and Karst. “It said that rest in peace.” This is how the folk singer found out that René Karst has died.
“It took me a few minutes to realize that it was really true,” he says. Sadness and disbelief, that went through him. “He was already singing when I was born,” Schuitmaker begins. “He fought all his life to be successful, and he succeeded.”
According to Schuitmaker, Karst was always committed. “When you travel from A to B through the country, you are always busy. But René always made time for a chat and he always offered a listening ear. I am sure everyone will miss that,” he says firmly.
Presenter and programmer Willie Oosterhuis has known René Karst in that capacity for as long as he has been doing his job. “He was a sweet man,” he says. “Above all, he is a professional. Ultimately, he achieved great success with his party songs, but he is above all a singer-songwriter who has created beautiful, melodious songs.”
Oosterhuis knows that Karst was also busy caring for his grandchildren. “He wanted to make Ploef the Bear great again, for example, the famous bear that Karst sang about so often. He wanted to make a children’s book out of it, especially for his grandchildren.”
“The family will now be very sad,” says Oosterhuis. “But I hope that when we have progressed a little further, we will continue to honor his merits. You are only really worth something if you can mean something to others. René Karst was able to do that. He has made the world a little more beautiful.”