Ljiljana Buttler

Ljiljana Buttler, born Ljiljana Petrović, was a Yugoslav Romani singer of folk songs, sevdah and old city ballads. She was born in Belgrade on 14 December 1944, during the Second World War, and made her career in Belgrade, which is why she is on Muzika-Balkan under Serbia. Her father was a Romani accordion player from Serbia who left the family soon after she was born; her mother, also called Ljiljana, was a Croatian singer from Zagreb. She spent her last years in Düsseldorf, Germany, where she died.

Her mother supported the family by singing in bars and settled with her daughter in Bijeljina, in Bosnia. When Ljiljana was about twelve, her mother fell ill, and the girl went to the café and asked to sing in her place. A year later her mother left, and Ljiljana kept singing in cafés to pay her way through school.

She then moved back to Belgrade and sang in the bars of Skadarlija, the old bohemian quarter, where some of her performances were recorded for Radio Belgrade. Her first albums came out in the early 1980s, among them Duško, Duško in 1982, and from 1980 she gave concerts and became well known on television. In 1987 she left the music scene, and during the wars of the 1990s she emigrated to Düsseldorf, where she married and took the surname Buttler.

In 2002 Dragi Šestić of Mostar Sevdah Reunion persuaded her to return and record for Snail Records. The Mother of Gypsy Soul, made with the band and the trumpeter Boban Marković, brought her to world-music audiences; Simon Broughton of Songlines called it "one of my CDs of the year". The Legends of Life and the live Once Upon a Time in Mostar followed with the band, she sang at Womad in 2007, and her last album, Frozen Roses, came out in 2009.

In the former Yugoslavia she was called the "Gypsy Ella Fitzgerald" and the "Billie Holiday of Gypsy Music", and she has been compared with Esma Redžepova and Šaban Bajramović. Ljiljana Buttler died of cancer in Düsseldorf on 26 April 2010, aged 65. The playlist holds the whole of The Mother of Gypsy Soul, from "Ashun daje mori" to "Đelem đelem daje".