Na Golici

In 1954 Slavko Avsenik was working night shifts at the Tonosa factory in Ljubljana, knitting socks on a machine. While the machine ran on its own from foot to waist, he listened to its rhythm and a melody came to him. He could not read music, so he scribbled it on the napkin from his meal break as a string of ta-ra-ra syllables, finishing in about twenty minutes. The next day his brother Vilko, a trained composer, wrote it out properly and arranged it for accordion, clarinet, trumpet and baritone. Slavko named it after Golica, a mountain whose daffodils reminded him of little bells. The first recording, made for Radio Ljubljana, went nowhere. Then Ljubo Hartman started playing it on radio in Klagenfurt, where Fred Rauch, an editor of a popular request show on Munich radio, happened to hear it while on holiday at Lake Wörthersee. He began playing it in Munich, and it became a huge success almost overnight. In January 1955 Telefunken recorded a new version in Klagenfurt, with an echo effect added experimentally, and released it in Germany as "Trompetenecho". Rauch later got the brothers to sign a contract in a radio lobby that, by the Slovene account, gave him a co-writing credit and half the royalties in the German-speaking market. It was not even released as a single in Yugoslavia until 1957. Today it is said to be the most played instrumental in the world, with some 600 cover versions, and the founding tune of the whole Oberkrainer sound.