musical feeling involved not only conscious musical valuation but also bodily experiences of clapped rhythms, reverberating space, and musical ignition. Moving Croatian American audiences to intense affect (embodied feeling) was already a primary concern in Croatian nationalist discourse and helped to naturalize its tenets through somatic experience. In Šovagović’s description the Osijek travelers also reveled in influencing audience members’ own tambura performance practice. Croatian American folklorist Richard March notes from firsthand experience that “the 1979 tour made Kičo’s [sic] Slavonian songs and the Slavonski Bećari’s tight, transparent music all the rage. Rabid fans drove hundreds of miles from concert to concert to see the show again and again [and] eagerly snatched up” his “records and cassettes” (2013, 205). These releases soon became staple sonic vehicles for Croatian tamburaši’s affective labor throughout North America.
For their part, Osijek performers particularly valued the homestays. Vesna, a future STD “Pajo Kolarić” secretary, went with Šokadija in 1979; she recalled fondly to me how enthusiasts and performers in the two countries had connected during visits with midwestern Croatian families, including her relatives.17 These homestays reinforced tambura music’s expressive and affective power for celebrating family and homeland across varying degrees of temporal, cultural, and territorial separation.
New Tambura Relations and Projects in the 1980s
Ensemble tours between North America and Socialist Croatia also engendered new transnational familial relations, contributing significantly to the mobilization of national sentiment within and beyond Croatia’s borders. The CFU instituted regular North American tours by professional male Croatian tamburaši, many of whom wed Croatian American women. In 1986, for example, Slavonski Bećari invited Miroslav Škoro, then a little-known rock singer-cum-comedian, to tour North America with the band. Škoro met Croatian American Kim Ann Luzaich in Pittsburgh and soon wedded and joined her there.
Škoro’s relocation to start a family, while separating him physically from close tamburaši associates Slavonski Bećari (one of whom, Branko Helajz, had been kum [“best man”] at the wedding), ultimately advanced his tambura career. Shortly after he returned to the United States in 1989, Škoro met Jerry Grcevich, who had grown up playing with his father, his uncle, and his father’s Cokeburg Junior Tamburitzan ensemble. Already an established, virtuosic tambura recording artist, Grcevich suggested that they collaborate. The result was that “I started writing songs, and Jerry started composing, and after some time we had an entire album” (Škoro 2010, 71; my translation). The song “Ne dirajte mi ravnicu” (Don’t touch my plain) would have a lasting influence on tambura music in Croatia upon its release in 1992, eventually making Škoro and Grcevich popular icons as the genre flourished in the newly independent republic.
The tamburaši who first moved thousands to tears with that song were not associated with Grcevich or Škoro, however, but another band that toured for the CFU in the 1980s. In 1992 Zlatni Dukati (Golden Ducats) rerecorded and released the title track from Grcevich’s and Škoro’s album. About the different versions, Škoro notes:
“Ne dirajte mi ravnicu” came into existence in 1989, in late fall when the sky and I were both crying. The sky for the waning summer and year, and I for everything18 that I left in the plain. […] Vlado Smiljanić changed its name [from I Will Return …]. [W]hen [Zlatni Dukati manager] Josip Ivanković heard it, he immediately recorded the famous video with Zlatni Dukati in which the late [actor] Fabijan Šovagović lets a tear fall for his wounded Slavonia and this is all mixed with scenes from Schmidt’s great films “Đuka Begović” and “Sokol ga nije volio.” (2010, 195; my translation)
The latter film (Sokol did not love him) depicts World War II struggles over Slavonia by Yugoslav Partisans and Croatia’s Nazi-aligned Ustaša party. Furthermore, the song’s “wartime relevance was reinforced by a video with Škoro performing it around an army campfire” (Baker 2010, 26). Zlatni Dukati, and later Škoro, turned what was “originally a typical song about emigrants’ nostalgia” (27) into a “teleological narrative of collective displacement and ethnic defiance” during Eastern Slavonia’s occupation (26). This realized anew the song’s promise of return: Dukati delivered the sentiments of displacement and longing from the diaspora to its newly autonomous country’s people and lands, where the song relayed a further promise of return from war to peace (and from refuges to occupied lands) and suggested a narrative for this promise’s fulfillment.
This was not Zlatni Dukati’s first transplantation of Croatian American sentiments. On the 1988 CFU tour “was born the idea for recording the album of patriotic songs ‘Croatian songbook,’ which would contribute to popularizing the ensemble and tambura music in general, […] to liberating the national spirit as well as to developing and establishing democratic relations in the then Socialist Republic of Croatia” (Zlatni Dukati 2014; my translation; also cited in March 2013, 223).
Some songs released on the 1989 cassette had been popular in World War II Ustaša campaigns. Although the songs predate World War II, and the “leader of the ensemble modified the lyrics in a way to exclude direct associations with the Ustashas” (Pettan 1998, 12), their patriotic content was potentially problematic in multiethnic Yugoslavia. Rumors quickly spread about a plot by Communist Jugoton leadership to pull the album, and “the affair made tamburica music a politicized product by depicting it as a Croatian value under threat from an expansionist Serbia which was operating through Yugoslav federal structures” (Baker 2010, 60). The democratic relations that the group later noted helping to establish involved partnering with the Hrvatska demokratska zajednica (Croatian Democratic Party, hereafter HDZ), a decidedly Croat-oriented party headed by historian and former general and MIH leader Dr. Franjo Tuđman. The party aimed to liberate not just the national spirit but also the nation from Yugoslavia, and it hired Zlatni Dukati to capitalize on rising nationalist fervor for its successful 1990 election campaigns (Bonifačić 1998). The elections put the HDZ in the driver’s seat of Croatia’s machine of secession and war the following year, and the band would continue to work for Tuđman, Croatia’s first president, throughout the 1990s.
Thus Zlatni Dukati, along with STD “Pajo Kolarić,” Slavonski Bećari, Miroslav Škoro, and Jerry Grcevich, at times played integral roles not only in building relations between countries but also in erecting new national barriers. While not all Croats shared the HDZ’s sentiments about nationalist organizing, the feeling for the nation (as a territorializing people) that musicians mobilized transnationally proved to be a significant force in reshaping and centering intimate social networks through Croatia’s territory. Transgressing the admittedly weakened official Yugoslav ideals of “fraternity and unity” and fostering through such risky performances a “fraternal union” with Croats abroad, musicians made accessing these intimate foreign spaces commonly imaginable, even to those who did not (yet) seek them.
The 1990s, however, also brought something not commonly imaginable in the previous decade: the physical violence and danger that escalated between the Yugoslav and Croatian armies and various paramilitary forces. As Jerry Grcevich notes, one could “feel” the tensions between different ethnic groups by the late 1980s, and playing the wrong nation’s song in the wrong venue was a risk with repercussions (typically verbal abuse) that he experienced firsthand (Grcevich 2012). However, the force of musical danger, if intensely affective, only rarely threatened lasting physical harm of the nature that musicians would face during the war. I detail the latter more thoroughly in chapter 1 but consider it important to examine here briefly the Yugoslav conflicts’ impact on ensembles within the territories and borders of the nascent nation-state. Tambura music’s affective facilitation and textual narrativization of the reestablishment of transnational ties with a variety of foreign enclaves test the limits of the concept of diaspora. I suggest here the intellectual merits to extricating from this broad analytic a set of displacements, returns, and intimacies that are sometimes lost in both academic and lay conceptions of dispersion from a homeland.
