Ivo Robić

Ivo Robić was a Croatian singer and composer, a pioneer of popular music and schlager and the first Croatian singer with a big international career. He was born in Garešnica on 28 January 1923, the eldest of three sons, and grew up in Bjelovar, where his father led a tamburica orchestra; as a boy he sang in a choir, played the violin and started a school dixieland band.

In 1943 he went to Zagreb to study law and began singing in bars and on the radio. In 1949 he recorded his first record, "Ti ni ne slutiš" / "Kad zvjezdice", for the newly founded Jugoton, and from 1950 he sang on the terrace of the Hotel Kvarner in Opatija, which became his trademark for decades. He won the first Zagrebfest in 1953 with "Ta tvoja ruka mala" and the first Opatija festival in 1958 with "Mala djevojčica", a duet with the young Zdenka Vučković, and he won Zagrebfest again with "Golubovi" in 1964 and "Zbog čega te volim" in 1965. His own songs include "Srce, laku noć" and "Samo jednom se ljubi".

From 1956 he recorded 55 singles for the Czechoslovak label Supraphon. In February 1959, for Polydor, he recorded "Morgen" with the orchestra of Bert Kaempfert. It sold more than a million copies and earned him a gold record and the nickname Mister Morgen; it reached number 13 on the US Billboard chart, a first for a German-language song, and number 23 in Britain. He appeared on the Perry Como and Ed Sullivan shows, and had further German hits with "Muli-Song", "Mit 17 fängt das Leben erst an", "Rot ist der Wein" and "Fremde in der Nacht", the German version of "Strangers in the Night", which he also sang in Croatian as "Stranci u noći".

He played the piano, saxophone, clarinet, flute and double bass, lived between Zagreb and Opatija with his wife Marta, and kept touring Germany, America and Australia. Ivo Robić died in Rijeka on 9 March 2000. The playlist gathers official lyric videos of his recordings.