Search Kurdish social media for a wedding video from Urfa, Diyarbakır or Duhok, and there is a good chance you will hear an İbrahim Tatlıses song. He is one of the best-selling singers in the history of Turkish music, nicknamed "İbo" and "the Emperor", with more than forty albums since 1970. He is also a son of a Kurdish mother from Urfa who grew up speaking Kurdish at home.
This article looks at İbrahim Tatlıses songs through that lens: his roots, the hits people search for, and the small but real set of Kurdish-language songs he has recorded. We keep to what the record shows. Tatlıses has been a public figure for more than fifty years, and not every chapter is a happy one, but our interest here is the music.
İbrahim Tatlıses: quick facts
- Born: 1952, Urfa (Şanlıurfa), Turkey, as İbrahim Tatlı
- Status: living (as of 2026)
- Origin: Arab father, Kurdish mother; grew up speaking Kurdish and Arabic
- Genre: Turkish folk (türkü), arabesk and pop; the Urfa singing tradition
- Voice: known above all for the uzun hava, the free-rhythm "long air"
- Kurdish songs: Şemmame (on Yağmurla Gelen Kadın, 2009), Rinda Min
- Known for: Aramam, Mavişim, Mutlu Ol Yeter, the TV show İbo Show, and a career of more than 40 albums
Early life in Urfa
İbrahim Tatlıses was born in 1952 in Urfa, in southeastern Turkey. His father was Arab and his mother was Kurdish, and he grew up with both languages at home. Turkish came later. His father died when he was a child, the family was poor, and he did not go on to high school. He could not read or write when he was young, and he worked from boyhood. His stage name is a play on the family name Tatlı, "sweet": Tatlıses means "sweet voice".
Urfa matters to his music. The city has its own strong vocal tradition, heard at the sıra gecesi, long evenings of song among friends, and in the ornate uzun hava, an unmetered vocal style close to the free-rhythm songs of Kurdish singers across the border. Urfa is also a city where Kurdish, Arabic and Turkish have been spoken side by side for centuries. The mix of those three worlds is audible in Tatlıses's singing from the start.
Career: from cassettes to the "Emperor"
Tatlıses made his first recording in 1970, at around 18. His real breakthrough came in the 1970s with Ayağında Kundura, a folk song that became a nationwide hit and made him a star. (Sources give different years for this record, so we leave the exact date aside.)
Through the 1980s and 1990s he became the leading voice of arabesk, the emotional, string-heavy popular music of Turkey's cities, while still recording folk songs from his region. Songs such as Mutlu Ol Yeter and Mavişim made him a household name. He also acted in dozens of films, many of them built around his songs, and from 1993 to 2011 he hosted his own television programme, İbo Show. In total he has released more than forty albums, including Selam Olsun (1999), Neden? (2008) and Yağmurla Gelen Kadın (2009).
His later hit Aramam ("I Won't Call") travelled far beyond Turkey. It is among his most translated songs and has been reworked by singers in the Arab world and elsewhere.
On 14 March 2011 he was shot in the head by unknown attackers as he left a television studio in Istanbul. He survived after surgery and a long recovery, part of it at a trauma clinic in Germany. Since then he has recorded and appeared less often.
His Kurdish songs
For most of his career Tatlıses recorded in Turkish. That was partly the market and partly the law. Turkish restrictions on Kurdish-language recordings were only lifted in 1991, and even after that, singing in Kurdish on mainstream Turkish television remained sensitive for years. We describe that background in how Kurdish music was banned.
Kurdish was still part of his story from early on. In 1986 he was prosecuted in Turkey for singing Kurdish songs at a concert in Sweden, and he was acquitted the following year. The prosecution itself tells you how things stood at the time: singing a Kurdish song abroad could end up in court at home.
Şemmame (2009)
The clear turning point came with the album Yağmurla Gelen Kadın in May 2009. It included Şemmame, a Kurmanji folk song. According to the Wikipedia article on his 2008 album Neden?, that album still had no Kurdish lyrics, and Şemmame the following year was the moment the "barrier was broken". Milliyet reported at the time that the album sold strongly and earned a gold record.
Şemmame is a traditional song. The word means a small, fragrant ornamental melon, and in the song it is a name for a beautiful young woman. It is also a line-dance tune, and it is played at Kurdish weddings for the govend or halay. If you know the dance, you will recognise the song. Our guide to Kurdish wedding music, govend and halay explains how these dance songs work.
Rinda Min
Tatlıses also recorded Rinda Min ("My Beautiful One"), a Kurmanji love song. This song is also a reminder that Kurdish songs have authors. The Kurdish singer and composer Beytocan (Beytullah Güneri, 1955–2023), a songwriter from Silvan who spent years in prison after the 1980 coup, saw his own song Yan Mirin Yan Diyarbekir banned, and later lived in exile in Sweden, sued Tatlıses, saying the song was his own composition, Agır Ketiye Dile Min, retitled and recorded without permission. In September 2016, after a case that had lasted around fifteen years, an Istanbul intellectual property court ruled in Beytocan's favour and ordered Tatlıses to pay compensation.
We mention the case because it is part of the record, and because it matters for anyone who cares about Kurdish music. Many songs that are loved across Turkey and Kurdistan began as Kurdish folk songs or as works by Kurdish composers, and credit is not always given. The same question comes up when comparing Kurdish, Persian, Arabic and Turkish music, traditions that have borrowed melodies from one another for centuries.
İbrahim Tatlıses's best songs
These are the titles people search for most. The first group is in Turkish; the last two are in Kurmanji.
Turkish hits
- Aramam ("I Won't Call"). His most internationally known song.
- Mavişim ("My Blue-Eyed One"). A love song and one of his most searched titles.
- Mutlu Ol Yeter ("Just Be Happy"). A classic arabesk ballad.
- Haydi Söyle ("Come On, Tell Me"). Widely covered and translated.
- Senden İnsaf Diler Yarın ("Tomorrow Will Beg You for Mercy"). From the 2008 album Neden?.
- Ayağında Kundura ("Shoes on Her Feet"). The Urfa song that made him famous.
Kurdish songs
- Şemmame. The Kurmanji dance song from Yağmurla Gelen Kadın (2009).
- Rinda Min ("My Beautiful One"). A Kurmanji love song, the subject of the Beytocan copyright case.
Legacy
İbrahim Tatlıses is one of the defining voices of Turkish popular music. His way of singing the uzun hava, with long held notes and heavy ornament, has been copied by a generation of singers from southeastern Turkey. His songs are sung at weddings and parties by Turks, Kurds and Arabs alike.
His legacy is also complicated, and it is fair to say so plainly. His public life has included legal disputes and serious allegations over the years, which have been widely reported in the Turkish press. He has also described his identity in different ways at different times. On several occasions he has summed it up in the line "my father is Arab, my mother is Kurdish, and I am Turkish". Some Kurdish listeners see him as a Kurdish voice who took years to sing in his mother's language; others see him simply as a Turkish star. Both views exist, and we leave the judgement to the reader.
The Kurdish connection
Here is what can be said with confidence:
- Family and language. His mother was Kurdish, and Kurdish was one of his first languages.
- Recorded Kurdish songs. Şemmame (2009) and Rinda Min are both in Kurmanji.
- A shared regional sound. The Urfa vocal style and the free-rhythm uzun hava are close relatives of the free-rhythm singing of Kurdish singers in the same region. Much of the music of southeastern Turkey, Kurdish and Turkish, is built on the same modal families. One of the most common is the Hijaz maqam, with its characteristic augmented second, which you will hear throughout arabesk.
- Shared instruments. The saz or bağlama that accompanies so much Anatolian folk song is as much a Kurdish instrument as a Turkish one, and so is the zurna that leads the wedding dances where his songs are played.
- Popularity in Kurdistan. His songs are widely played across Kurdish regions, above all at weddings, where Şemmame sits naturally beside the Kurmanji dance repertoire.
If you enjoy Şemmame and want more Kurdish dance songs, our Kurdish wedding evening playlist is a good next step.
Where to start listening
- For his voice: Mavişim and Mutlu Ol Yeter.
- For his international side: Aramam.
- For his Kurdish side: Şemmame, then Rinda Min.
- For the story of another Kurdish-born singer in Turkey: read our biography of Ahmet Kaya, who was forced into exile after saying he wanted to sing in Kurdish. The contrast between the two careers says a lot about how far things changed between 1999 and 2009.
- **For the songwriter behind Rinda Min:** visit the artist page of Beytocan.
Tatlıses's Kurdish recordings are few, but they point to a larger truth: much of the music of southeastern Turkey has Kurdish roots. We invite you to visit his artist page, then explore the Kurmanji songs in our notation library and hear where many of those melodies began.