Portrait of the Singer

Abstract

This article provides a brief biography of the guslar Halil Bajgorić, whose performances and interviews were recorded in June, 1935 by the fi eldwork team of Milman Parry, Albert Lord and Nikola Vujnović. Bajgorić lived in the remote village of Dabrica in the Mostar region of Bosnia, and claimed a repertoire of 36 epskih pjesama, including the “Ženidba Bećirbega Mustajbegova”, which has been published in an online, open-access edition (http://oraltradition.org/zbm) with audio and hypertext. During conversations with Parry and Lord’s colleague and interviewer Vujnović, the singer Bajgorić covered such topics as how and why he became interested in learning to perform epics, thesources for his songs, the role of published songbooks (he was himself illiterate),variation among performances of the same song, fact versus fi ction in the oral epic tradition, and the widespread legend of the “master guslar”, who serves as an anthropomorphic code-name for the epic tradition. Each of these topics has considerable importance for comparative, interdisciplinary studies in oral tradition as well as for promoting a deeper understanding of South Slavic oral epic.