Today, I arrived in Kotor. It’s the first time I’ve been here in 11 years. And coincidentally, I have a song from the Bay of Kotor (Boka...

It's been a long time since my last post! Sorry about that. But I'm back with one of my favorite posts so far. I'm interested to hear...

We have again arrived at a kolo song, this time from the southern Serbian town of Vranje. Fatiše kolo vranjske devojke (2 puta) Vranjske...

We are back, with another sevdalinka. This one may have been first performed by Zaim Imamović. He sings slightly different lyrics than...

I love a good film song. So many folk songs in Yugoslavia were popularized through film, and I, too, often learn new songs by watching...

One of the most difficult things for a person learning Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian as a foreign language is to remember the...

Đaurko mila, tuga me mori Za oči tvoje, što suze rone. Ustašca tvoja, prepuna baja – Ah, dođi, dođi sred zagrljaja! Znaš kako srce umilno...

This song takes me back to some of my first experiences in the Balkans. In 2010, I enrolled in a summer course in Dubrovnik, Croatia,...

Finally, we have come to a song that I cannot find a trace of on the Internet. It's interesting that some of the songs in this book have...

This song has been stuck in my head for months. With the help of this fellow (who I cannot endorse on anything other than his notes on...

The second song we will look at in our series on Velika Narodna Lira, the first in the “B” section, is a kolo song. The name once again...

The first song in Velika Narodna Lira, which is organized in alphabetical order, is “Aj, od kako sam sevdah svez’o.” It is a sevdalinka,...

I visited the Belgrade Book Fair twice in October 2019, and on the second go around I found this book, Velika Narodna Lira: 1000 Pesama...

Writing a list instead of a real first blog post is kind of like easing into the ocean by standing in the shallows for five minutes,...