Çoban Hüseyin, whose real name is Hüseyin Çemrek, is a folk minstrel (âşık) born in 1951 in the village of Yukarı Ovacık in the district of Gümüşhacıköy. Because he had worked as a shepherd (çoban) in his village as a boy, he was announced under this name when he first went on stage in Istanbul, and from then on he used the pen names "Çoban" and "Çoban Hüseyin". With the first record he made at the age of seventeen he won a gold record award in 1968; he went on to release dozens of records, appeared on radio and television, and spent many years at the head of minstrels' associations. He gathered his poems and his life story in a book entitled Türkü Savaşçısı (The Folk Song Warrior). As he is a living poet, no quotation from his poems is given on this page; his life and art are described on the basis of the sources.

His Life

Hüseyin Çemrek was born on 1 March 1951 in Yukarı Ovacık, a village of the Gümüşhacıköy district of Amasya. According to his own account his family traces its roots to the Turkmens of Central Asia, and the lineage is known as the "Deli Hasanlar". Deli Hasan, who gave the lineage its name, was a minstrel living in the region of İspir; during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, hearing that a death sentence was to be passed on him, he migrated first to Alaçam in Samsun and then to the township of Hamamözü in Gümüşhacıköy. Çemrek is the second member of the lineage after Deli Hasan to take up the saz.

Yukarı Ovacık is a village where Alevis and Sunnis live together, keep both cultures alive side by side and intermarry. Çemrek lived there until his youth and worked as a shepherd. In winter the village was a regular stop for travelling minstrels, and while serving them in the village guest room young Hüseyin had the chance to hear minstrels such as Âşık Veysel, Kul Hüseyin, Deli Boran, Âşık Cezayir and İsmail Ağa of Çorum. During his years as a shepherd he learned to play on a saz his elder brother had made from a wooden ladle, and later he began to write poems and compose tunes. İsmail Ağa, a fellow villager living in Istanbul, heard him, took him to Istanbul and put him on stage, announcing him as "Çoban Hüseyin". The owner of a record company had the seventeen-year-old minstrel, who appeared on stage in a mohair cap, make his first record; with this record he won a gold record award in 1968, and he went on to release 58 more.

Besides performing at concerts and on radio and television programmes, Çemrek has written village folk plays and acted in the theatre. He has attached great importance to association work for the survival of the minstrel tradition and spent forty years of his career as president of associations. He is the founder of the Folk Minstrels' Culture and Research Association (AŞ-DER), under whose roof he organised many activities, including writing and staging plays.

His View of Minstrelsy

Çemrek taught himself both the saz and the art of verse; since he was not trained by a master, he did not pass through the traditional stages of apprentice and journeyman, nor does he belong to any branch (kol) of the minstrel tradition. As the minstrels he took as models he names Davut Sularî of Erzincan, Âşık Veysel and Kul Ahmet of Maraş. He does not believe in the "bade" minstrel, the one said to receive his gift from a cup offered in a dream; he holds that this belief is used to raise a minstrel's prestige and that minstrels who claim it cut themselves off from the people. Even so, he believes that minstrelsy is a talent given by God. Although he has the gift for the verbal duel (atışma), he prefers to keep away from it: in his view the atışma was once a contest in which minstrels tested one another on historical, philosophical and religious subjects, whereas today it has turned into an effort to humiliate the opponent.

He takes a pessimistic view of the tradition's present state. He says that the state, the universities and the public show no interest in minstrelsy, that audiences have dwindled and that the tradition is close to its end; in his view the true minstrels left in Turkey can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

His Poetry

Copyright note: Since Çoban Hüseyin was alive when the sources were published, his poems are under copyright protection and cannot be published on this site as separate pages. Protection lasts until the end of the seventieth year after the poet's death.

Çemrek has written all his poems in the style of folk poetry, in syllabic metre, in quatrains and with rhyme. He most often uses lines of 7, 8 and 11 syllables. The subjects of his poems mostly carry a Sufi or social message: social ills, national and spiritual feelings, unity and solidarity, exile, nature, Islam, great figures, statesmen, the pursuit of knowledge and death are his main themes. He does not address his love poems to a particular beauty; their addressees remain unnamed. He has taken up his pen in response to events that moved him, whether happy or painful, and voiced his criticism in verse. In the poems he wrote for his close circle and for statesmen his tone is sincere and conversational.

Türkü Savaşçısı (Ankara 2009), in which he collected his poems, is an autobiographical work. At the beginning of the book he writes in detail about the origins of his family and its genealogy, then describes his mother and father, his own life from birth, his memories and his village; the rest of the book contains 150 of his poems. Because the sources accessible while this page was being prepared do not publish the texts of his poems, no quotation is given here.

Çoban Hüseyin was born in Gümüşhacıköy, and his lineage has lived in the villages of this district since the late nineteenth century. The name "Çoban Hüseyin" also appears in a list of the minstrels of the area between Gümüşhacıköy and Merzifon known locally as "Gaziler Ovacığı". Bülent Arı, in a study published in 2025, gives this list on the authority of a 2000 study by Ankaralı; the list is also quoted in our article on the minstrel tradition in Amasya. In the list the name is written twice and no further information about the person is given. That the Çoban Hüseyin of the list is Hüseyin Çemrek is our own inference from the fit of the name, the pen name and his village with the region.

The main source for his life is Çemrek's own book; Ahmet Dağlı, who wrote the entry in the Dictionary of Names in Turkish Literature, draws on this book and on a portrait of the minstrel prepared by Bediye Küçük and her colleagues. In the entry the years of these two sources differ between the text and the bibliography: Çemrek's book is dated 2010 in the text and 2009 in the bibliography, and the piece by Küçük and her colleagues 2010 in the text and 2008 in the bibliography. This page follows the years given in the bibliography.

Chronology

1877-1878: Âşık Deli Hasan, ancestor of the lineage, migrates during the Russo-Turkish War from the İspir region to Alaçam and then to the township of Hamamözü in Gümüşhacıköy.

1951: Born on 1 March in the village of Yukarı Ovacık, Gümüşhacıköy.

1968: Wins a gold record award with the first record he made at the age of seventeen.

2009: Türkü Savaşçısı, containing his life story and 150 poems, is published.

2019: His entry is published in the Dictionary of Names in Turkish Literature.

Bibliography

Primary sources

  • Bediye Küçük, K. Yöntem, Ö. Özdemir, M. Kellecioğlu, S. Keskin, "Hüseyin Çemrek (Âşık Çoban)", Sazın ve Sözün Sultanları I, ed. Fatma Ahsen Turan, Başak Uysal, Ankara: Gazi Kitabevi, 2008, pp. 241-248 (as cited by Dağlı).

Academic studies

Books

Online sources