Dilber Ay

Dilber Ay — Biography

Dilber Ay was a folk and arabesk singer known for her Barak-style long airs, who became a pop-culture icon in the 2010s through television. Her tough, confident, unmistakably forceful image sat alongside mournful türküs. She died in Ankara on 29 April 2019 and was buried in Düzce.

Born in the Pazarcık district of Kahramanmaraş to a Yörük and Kurdish family, she settled with her family in Düzce and first stood out as a young woman by winning a radio talent contest. She learned the Barak-style long airs from Halit Arapoğlu, sat the TRT Radio audition in 1974, worked in Ankara's gazino venues and released her first 45 rpm record that year. Meyrik (1981), both an album and its title song, reached a wide public. Her connection with film began with Beynelmilel (2006): the Adıyaman folk song known as "Tavukları Pişirmişem", sung in a club scene there, became a phenomenon and was even sung along to by Fenerbahçe players at the club's 2014 title celebration.

From 2011 to 2015 she hosted Kadere Mahkûmlar on Flash TV, performing arabesk songs in a studio ringed with iron bars. A 2012 exchange on CNN Türk, in which a presenter misheard a song title as the question "Zorunda mıyım", spread across social media and carried her to the mainstream. Her life story was dramatised in the 2021 film Dilberay.