Mišo Kovač

Mišo Kovač, born Mate Kovač, was a Croatian singer, born on 16 July 1941 in Šibenik during the Italian occupation of Dalmatia. His father came from Šibenik's Škopinac district and his mother from the island of Vrgada. As a young man he kept goal for the junior team of HNK Šibenik and dreamed of playing for Hajduk Split, but at around sixteen he turned to music, drawn by Italian singers and Johnnie Ray. In 1961 he shared the best performer title at the Prvi glas Šibenika competition, and after training as an upholsterer and serving in the army in Belgrade he moved to Zagreb.

A talent contest in Karlovac in 1964, where he sang Ray Charles's "I Can't Stop Loving You", got him signed to Jugoton, and his first record was a Croatian version of that song. In 1969 he won the Vaš šlager sezone festival in Sarajevo with "Više se nećeš vratiti", which sold 183,987 copies, and was Jugoton's best-selling singer of the year. That year also began his partnership with the composer Đorđe Novković, which lasted until Novković's death in 2007.

In 1971 he won the Split Festival with "Proplakat će zora", which sold more than 300,000 copies. "Ostala si uvijek ista" won the Yugoslav Hit Parade in Belgrade in 1975, and he won Split again in 1977 with Klapa Maslina and later with "Dobra ti večer, mati moja". Dalmacija u mom oku (1982) went gold, he tried for Eurovision in 1983 with "Posadi cvijet", and the late 1980s brought "Ako me ostaviš", "Jedan dan života" and "Ti si pjesma moje duše". In 1989 he was named person of the year in Yugoslavia.

The 1990s brought great personal losses, among them the death of his sixteen-year-old son Edi in 1992. In 1993 he sang to 50,000 people at the Poljud stadium in Split in the concert Noć svijeća, and in 2000 he won the Split Festival once more with "Vraćam ti se Dalmacijo mati". He played the Pula Arena in 2008 and the new Arena Zagreb for 20,000 fans in 2009.

Mišo Kovač said he had sold well over 20 million records, cassettes and CDs, and in 2005 the Croatian Music Institute honoured him for the most records sold in the history of Croatian discography. He received the Porin for lifetime achievement in 2012, and in 2014 a diamond award for the collection 100 originalnih hitova at two sold-out concerts in Zagreb. Dalmatian song runs through his work, from the 1974 album he recorded with Klapa Šibenik to "Sunce mi od tebe dolazi" with Klapa Rišpet in 2012.

Mišo Kovač died on 31 October 2026 at his home in Split, at the age of 85.