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When he was 19 he deserted his army post to chase a girl and ended up doing hard time (though he played for the prison soccer team and sang for the prison orchestra). Upon his release in 1964 he began singing professionally, and his career was marked by exploitation and excess–fly-by-night labels routinely took advantage of him, and his ostentatious spending sprees didn’t help matters either. The story goes that Bajramovic used the earnings from his first single, which had become a hit, to buy a white Mercedes and hire two bodyguards–and then promptly lost the car gambling.
His recordings are hard to find (and the ones I’ve heard are hit or miss), but his recent work with the Bosnian group Mostar Sevdah Reunion is easy to recommend. The best CD I’ve heard by him is this Croatian release, which is currently out of stock at Passion Music, an excellent mail-order source for Eastern European music.
