Branko Mataja

Branko Mataja (25 November 1923 – 9 September 2000) was a Yugoslav–American folk and blues musician. Early life

Mataja was born in 1923 in Bakar, then part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. His mother, from Marceline, Missouri, married Anton Mataja, a carpenter originally from Bakar whose last name is a traditional Croatian name from Gorski Kotar. They emigrated shortly after the wedding. Not long after Mataja was born the family moved to Belgrade. Mataja started to show an early interest in music and assembled his first guitar at the age of ten.

Nazi detention During the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941, Mataja, still a teenager, was arrested by German troops after he was unable to provide personal documentation and was sent to a labour camp in Germany. In the camp, he tried to evade forced labor by self-harming, but soon decided against it after being warned that the Germans could quickly notice that he was lying and immediately kill him. After American troops liberated the camp, Mataja spent a year at an American base, where he worked as a cook, barber and peddler of various goods such as nylon, cigarettes and chocolate. During this time Mataja befriended numerous American soldiers and started playing guitar in smaller clubs that they frequented.

Personal life and career After the war, seeing that the American quota for Yugoslav refugees was full and reluctant to return to the newly formed Yugoslavia, Mataja found refuge in England, initially living in a refugee camp in Yorkshire. There he met and married Montenegrin Roksanda Radonjić. Their son, Bata, was born in 1949. In the early 1950s, Mataja and his wife received British citizenship and moved to London, where they lived in small and cramped apartments. He assembled custom guitars for various musicians, including Johnny Cash and Geddy Lee.

A self-taught electrical engineer, Mataja opened his own shop in his garage at 5811 Satsuma Avenue, where he is believed to have recorded his album Traditional And Folk Songs Of Yugoslavia (1974) and other songs a decade later which were compiled in Over Fields And Mountains in 2022. He made several custom guitars over the years, but two are believed to have been the source of the music he recorded. Nearly half a century later Mataja's music has attracted the attention of music critics, publishers and news outlets, including The Guardian, as well as a wider, previously unreached audience.