Pussycat – Mississippi

Three former telephone operators from the Dutch countryside sang a country song about a river none of them had seen — and became the first act from Holland to top the British charts.

The most successful country record ever to come out of the Netherlands was written by a guitar teacher, sung by three sisters who had recently been telephone operators, and named after an American river that none of the people involved had ever laid eyes on. Mississippi is a song about longing for the Deep South performed with total conviction by musicians from the coal-mining region of Limburg — and in 1976 it did something no Dutch act had ever managed, climbing all the way to No. 1 in Britain and staying there. It sounds like Nashville. It came from a country better known for canals and windmills.

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The band grew out of a family. The three sisters at its center — Toni, Betty, and Marianne — had sung together for years through a string of earlier group names before settling, in early 1975, on Pussycat, built around Toni’s warm lead voice and the harmonies of her sisters. The man who gave them their sound was Werner Theunissen, a Dutch composer who had literally taught the sisters guitar and now wrote their material. He handed them Mississippi, a wistful country ballad of homesickness for a place he’d imagined rather than visited, and EMI producer Eddy Hilberts steered it away from the rock treatment the band had first attempted and toward a clean, aching country-pop arrangement. There is a small, telling detail in how carefully it was made: EMI postponed the February 1975 recording session until after Carnival, the wild pre-Lenten festival of the southern Netherlands, so that the sisters wouldn’t turn up with voices wrecked from celebrating.

The slow road to No. 1

In its home country the record was an immediate sensation, topping the Dutch chart in 1975 and spreading fast across Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Britain was the holdout. The single sat unreleased or unnoticed there for a full year before it finally caught, and when it did, it went all the way — No. 1 on the UK Singles Chart in October 1976, a genuine shock for a Dutch-language nation’s act singing in English about the American South. No group from the Netherlands had ever topped the British charts before. The achievement was formal enough to earn a ceremony: on January 5, 1977, the British Ambassador to the Netherlands presented Pussycat with an export prize for becoming the first Dutch pop group to reach No. 1 in Britain. The song also topped the charts in New Zealand and South Africa, where it was the best-selling single of 1977, and its worldwide sales are estimated at five million copies or more.

A signature that outlived almost everyone

Pussycat kept hitting for another decade — Georgie, Smile, and a long run of European success, with regular appearances on West German television — but nothing ever eclipsed Mississippi, which remains the group’s undisputed signature and one of the defining Euro-country records of its era. Time has since thinned the ranks of the people who made it. Werner Theunissen, the guitar teacher whose song sold in the millions, died in January 2010. Betty, one of the three sisters, died in 2024, and founding drummer Theo Coumans died in June 2025 at 76. What endures is the record itself: three and a half minutes of imagined homesickness, sung so sincerely that listeners on five continents believed every word, from a band that reached the Mississippi only in song.