Selda Bağcan

Selda Bağcan is a Turkish folk singer, guitarist and one of the best-known voices of Anatolian folk music. Her full name is Havva Selda Bağcan, and she was born on 14 December 1948 in Muğla, Turkey. Her father Selim, a veterinarian, was a Macedonian Turk from Bitola in today's North Macedonia, and her mother Fevziye, a teacher, was of Crimean Tatar origin; through her father she has a place among the artists of North Macedonia here, although she is above all a Turkish singer.

She was the youngest of four children and the only girl. Her father's work took the family to Van, where she spent most of her childhood; after he died in 1957 the family moved to Ankara. She started on the mandolin at the age of five and later took up the guitar. While studying engineering physics at Ankara University she sang regularly at Beethoven, a music club in Ankara run by her brothers.

Her professional career began in 1971 with the support of producer Erkan Özerman. Her first two singles, among them "Seher Vakti", sold around a million copies, and she decided to make music her profession. In 1972 she represented Turkey at the Golden Orpheus festival in Bulgaria. Between 1974 and 1985 she released the ten albums of her Türkülerimiz series, her own arrangements of Turkish folk songs, and she toured Turkey and western Europe.

The albums Dost Merhaba (1986), Yürüyorum Dikenlerin Üstünde (1987) and Felek Beni Adım Adım Kovaladı (1989) followed. In 1987 she played festivals in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, and in 1990 she performed in the Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Israel and Denmark. "Ziller ve İpler" from the 1992 album of the same name was one of the big Turkish hits of the 1990s, and in 1994 she recorded the album Koçero with Ahmet Kaya.

She survived a serious car accident on the way to a concert in Antakya in late 2000 and returned with Ben Geldim (2002), Güvercinleri de Vururlar (2009) and Halkım (2011). Her songs, among them "Dost Merhaba", "Gesi Bağları", "Haydar Haydar" and "Sarhoş", are also known to a new audience abroad: her recordings have been sampled by Mos Def, Dr. Dre and 2manydjs, she headlined the Le Guess Who? festival in Utrecht in 2014 and played Primavera Sound in Barcelona in 2016. She lives in Istanbul and runs her own record company, Majör Müzik.