Emina Zečaj

Emina Zečaj, born Ahmedhodžić, was a Bosnian interpreter of the sevdalinka, the traditional song of Bosnia, and one of the singers most credited with preserving it in the second half of the twentieth century. She was born on 17 March in Sarajevo's old town, the daughter of Avdija and Melća Ahmedhodžić, and finished secondary textile school and the madrasa. In 2004 the American magazine Billboard called her an "icon of traditional Bosnian music".

She was discovered in the early 1960s by the ethnomusicologist Cvjetko Rihtman. Encouraged by friends and by the singer Slavka Petrovska, she auditioned at Radio Sarajevo before the professors Zvonimir Nevžela and Beluš Jungić with "Kad se jangin iz sokaka pomoli" and "Poranila na vodicu Zlata". Ten days later Ismet Alajbegović Šerbo phoned to tell her she had been accepted, ahead of thirty other candidates.

At first she sang with the folk orchestra and the accordion of Alajbegović Šerbo. Later she was offered the chance to sing with the saz, and so became, according to Bosnian Wikipedia, the only woman to sing the original sevdalinka that way, accompanied by the saz players Selim Salihović, Hašim Muharemović and, after the war, Mehmed Gribajčević. With Gribajčević she sang at folk music festivals in Ljubljana, Innsbruck, Vienna, Oslo and elsewhere.

Besides hundreds of recordings for the archive of Radio Sarajevo, she released singles, LPs and CDs, among them Pijana sam i bez pića (1974), Narodne pjesme iz Bosne (1975) and Traditional Bosnian Songs (2003). Her album of 2008 on Gramofon, with the accordionist Avdaga Buzar, was recorded in the spring of 2005 and produced by Edin Zubčević. She also sang for Pjer Žalica's film Gori vatra (Fuse) and, with Adi Lukovac, for Dino Mustafić's Remake, both from 2003, and Bulgarian television made a documentary with her, Bosanska sevdalinka.

She was also a collector, tracking down and documenting old sevdalinkas, and her way of singing has been studied by critics and ethnomusicologists at home and abroad. Emina Zečaj died at her home in Sarajevo on the night of 19 April 2020, a month after attending the funeral of Beba Selimović, and was buried at the Bare cemetery.