It was spring, the likes of which there is no more in this millennium. The snow was melting, corroding even the best shoes with salty street water. It rained overnight. I walked around my town, legless, aimless. At the intersection where the road to Tuzla diverged, on the left, through the open doors of the cafe, folk club, aščinica and beer hall "Tuzlanka", a voice came that stopped me.
There was some prophetic, liturgical power in it. Some smoky jazz. And a lot of karasevdah.
Don't curse me, don't curse me, mother/ don't ask me about my destiny/ I gave everything I have for her, mother,/ don't curse me, don't curse me, mother.
First listen
I entered the bar. Bartender Harry greeted me with a wink. At the bar were only Fudo, a journalist, and Zvezdan aka Zvijezda - a paramedic. I knew him since childhood. He was able to play "techniques" several hundred times by hitting the ball with his stiff foot without it touching the ground. With the same passion with which he once played table tennis, basketball, then football - and all sports were great for him - now he drank drink after drink in his free time at the bar. Fudo was his best partner in that and apart from raising beer, he didn't care about other sports.
Instead of greeting, Zvijezda put his finger to his mouth. With his eyes closed, pointing his hand at the speaker, as if inviting someone to the stage, he had an expression of that intoxicated bliss that in the Balkans can only be given by a mixture of insatiable longing, alcoholic fumes and music that gets under the skin.
That was the first time I saw up close what Lewis's voice can do to people who recognize it as a voice telling a story from their soul.
In the mid-eighties, where folk songs, framed by stereotyped musical phrases, competed in poor rural metaphors, this voice announced what was to come - a time of fusion of world and local musical traditions.
The star said to Harry - give someone what to drink and give this one more time. Harry shrugged his shoulders sheepishly, and told me somewhat helplessly - we haven't listened to the end of the tape yet, I have to keep going back to this one.
Louis of Eurydice
In 1980, Luis sang in the night club Eurydika -- in the Yugoslav decades, the entire musical elite passed through it, with occasional guests from abroad such as Toto Cutunjo or Tina Turner. Lewis sang evergreens and jazz. One evening, the owner of the club asked him to sing "something of ours". According to urban legend, Luis, accompanying himself on the synthesizer, sang what he loved: "Don't curse me, don't curse me mother". A king reigned in Eurydice. And then the applause broke out with a standing ovation. It is said that Louis had to sing this song several times. I read somewhere that the Belgrade press described Luis after that night as a "crazed jazzer" who "dressed in an Egyptian galabia" produces a trance in the audience. His jazz being met Gypsy, South Serbian, Macedonian and Vlach melos and - a star was born. Jovan Nikolić Jof, who used to perform at Euridik in those years, confirmed to me that Luis first played on that stage all those songs that would later become Yugoslav hits and that it was obvious that this man with an incredible repertoire of worldly things from soul to jazz, there won't be just another excellent anonymous musician from the Belgrade night.
In the same year, Luis received an offer to record a record. Its first print run was 2.000, and within a few months they had to print up to 150.000.
The story of the song
Although I also thought that Luis took the song after which he named his first album from the folk treasury and covered it in his own way, that is not true. The name of the composer is known. Miloš Miša Aranđelović from Belgrade wrote this poem between the two wars. By the way, he was an economist by profession, he studied in France. He was "lucky" that both the singers and the audience are convinced to this day that the song was written somewhere in the taverns of southern Serbia.
I learned all this while listening to the nice radio show "Guests from the Past". In the show, Slobodan Jović, remembering the composer, said that he flow Misha, as he was called, told that in 1940 he moved to Vares as a high-ranking bank official. He and his friend Pero, whom he knew from his studies in France, were hanging out with two girls in the bar of the Vara hotel. They were sisters, and Pero was courting one of them. She fell in love, but she knew very well that Peri's love was reckless and that it would not be hers. She asked the composer to immortalize her unhappy love with a song. That winter in Vares, Miša Aranđelović wrote the following verses:
Don't curse me, don't curse me mother,/ don't ask me about a difficult fate./ Don't curse me, don't curse me mother,/ I gave him everything, did I make a mistake?/ Don't look for him, don't call him, mother/ don't look for him I am not without a friend./ Day and night wherever I go, mother/ sadness is with me.
So, at the heart of this heartbreaking ballad is - women's pain. In 1980, Lewis made a man's "overwhelming sadness" out of him. The multi-decade journey of the song from Vareš through Belgrade's Eurydika to a bar in a Bosnian town was strange, where I heard it performed by Luis for the first time.
Biographical fragments
Ljubiša Stojanović Louis was born in 1952 in Leskovac. His family often moved, so it is recorded in his biography that he graduated from a junior music school in Negotin, started studying music in Niš, and then - like everyone who wants to do something - went to Belgrade.
However, hardly anyone knows that in 1975 he represented Yugoslavia at an international festival in Japan. He performed a song from southeastern Serbia and - he won. Likewise, his later fame suppressed the details of his life that were important to Louis. He got the nickname as a boy in Negotin. He wore Louis Armstrong records under his arm. Since the original version of the name of the great American musician, written on the album covers, was Louis - and in Serbian, as you know, it can only be read with that loud, redundant "s": Luis. The nickname stuck. Later, this native of Leskov added his nickname - Ljubiša Stojanović Louis - to his identity card. As a young man, he went to the sea with a guitar and a backpack and sang there. For some time he lived in Germany, in Munich he had to clean the stairs, because there was a lull in music. Only a few years later, he sang in Russia at sold-out concerts, which he spoke of as the best energy opiate of his life. He shaved his head in 1981 before going to the Adriatic where he sang in a hotel. The Egyptian galabies reminded him of the clothing from the Nemanjić era. He bought the first and sewed the others himself. He was the father of six children, three marriages marked his life. There is a gap of several decades between the oldest and the youngest child.
Across genre boundaries
In Yugoslavia, Luis completely erased the hard border between urban and rural, avant-garde and traditional, folk and rock. He taught people, including me, that music is divided into good and bad, regardless of genre. It was recorded that when asked how he would define his music, he responded with humor - that's my music.
I have never been to Luis's concert, I have not experienced his tears during some songs. He testified about one concert: "I could feel the music, as if it were matter. Any orgasm is uninteresting compared to that".
It seemed that his international career would also smile on him. In 2011, Dragi Šestić with his Dutch music label Snail Records released a selection from Luis's opus under the title "The Last King Of The Balkans". Regardless of the pretentiousness of the title, which wanted to bring the exotic synthesis of ethno-pop and jazz closer to Westerners, the title of the album for the Western market "The Last Balkan King" had one correct statement. Lewis was one of the last self-proclaimed musical greats that wasn't created by technological-propaganda techniques. But world success was not destined for Luis. Although European invitations for "world music" concerts began to arrive, a traffic accident in which he died while sitting behind the wheel in the north of Bačka, near Feketić, in the early morning hours of July 31, 2011, put an end to that ascent.
Music of the world
That then, in the mid-eighties, I told Zvezdan at the bar in Tuzlanka that Luis was creating world music he would look at me with wide eyes full of wonder, make one of his famous grimaces, and say: Don't shit!
Long before that beer ad, Lewis had indeed found an irresistible formula - Global, but ours.
He has not been with us for ten years. I haven't been to a single celebration in that decade without people wanting to hear something of his. Luis will live on through his songs. This is completely clear, especially in Leskovac, where I end this entry. Luis's hometown is one of the most important points on the Sevdalian arc from Sarajevo to Skopje, where, according to Dvorniković, the best musicians have been born since ancient times.
Bonus video:
