Throughout the Balkans, Saban Bajramovic was the undisputed king of Gypsy singers. For 20 years he toured the Continent with his group, Black Mamba, and later he performed and recorded with the many musicians who wanted to back him.

Josip Broz Tito, President of the former Socialist Federated Republic of Yugoslavia, and the Indian leaders Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi both invited “Shaban” to play for them.

When he died in his home town of Nis in southern Serbia an estimated 10,000 people turned out for his Muslim funeral, among them the Serbian President, Boris Tadic.

Bajramovic’s early years in Nis were not promising. His parents, Roma of the Arlije tribe, took casual work on farms and anywhere else they could find it. Often unsupervised, he became a boy of the street, where one day, he recalled, he heard a fragment of music drifting from a window and was able to reproduce the notes faultlessly. He realised he had perfect pitch. With his rough yet warm and soulful baritone, and his easy melding of jazz, blues and Cuban influences with Romany and Balkan genres, he progressed naturally to performing at wedding feasts.

Conscription, then jail, put a temporary stop to that. In his late teens he was sent for several years to the barren prison island of Goli Otok in the north Adriatic Sea, a dumping place for Tito’s political opponents, as well as criminals.

Bajramovic liked to say he was jailed because he had absconded from the army to seek out a girl he fancied. Survival on “Naked Island” became easier once his goalkeeping and singing skills were known. In jail he also acquired the skill of reading.

He was popular with Serbs and his cassettes, LPs and CDs sold well. He also made good money by travelling to Milan, Rome and Naples to play at weddings for the many Roma exiles in Italy. They would send him back to Yugoslavia with his car laden with gold. His love of gambling meant that it did not last long.

Tall, and in his early years good-looking, Bajramovic was often flirtatious. With his rakish moustache and gold-capped teeth (both features later discarded) set in a scarred face, he built on the flamboyant aspects of his character to portray himself as a musical vagabond, hard to pin down in one place. Stories would circulate that one day he had been seen in Belgrade, a white-suited dandy in a chauffeur- driven Mercedes-Benz, the next singing in a Viennese bar. In reality, however, he could usually be contacted simply by telephoning his home.

Some of the scars that marked his body he attributed to knives that were pulled over matters of honour or of sexual passion, and certainly such fights were not unusual on the prison island.

Other stories about him were exaggerated if not self-propagated: a press release for one of his albums stated that he had forgotten how many women he had wed and how many children he had fathered throughout the Balkans — but again the reality was quite different. Bajramovic was married only once, to Milica, an Arlije woman 17 years his junior, in 1976.

His career seemed unstoppable until the emergence in the 1990s of “turbofolk”. This raucous, Turkishinfluenced Serbian gangster-pop sidelined the vocally sophisticated Bajramovic. Eventually matters changed for the better after Dragi Sestic, a Bosnian producer working in the Netherlands, heard a recording of Bajramovic and persuaded him to record A Gypsy Legend with the Balkans-unity orchestra Mostar Sevdah Reunion. The CD was released in 2001 and may be his best album.

Hard living began to take its toll on Bajramovic’s constitution, and his health began to be a worry, particularly for his wife: when he was touring, his beloved Mica was not always on hand to remind him to take the daily injections necessary for his diabetes. He avoided the recreational drugs that often go with show business but he was rarely without a bottle of spirit in one of his pockets.

Sometimes illness forced him to cancel performances at short notice and he began to acquire a reputation for unreliability. His love of singing at social gatherings of his people also contributed to that reputation: he might be preparing for a big concert in some West European city, but then, hearing about a Gypsy wedding in the vicinity, he would jump into a taxi to sing for hours at the party.

This tendency did not deprive England of the opportunity to hear him. The London concert promoter Gordana Miller, who brought Bajramovic and his band to the Astoria Theatre in the West End of London in 2006, recalled: “I was worried up to the last hours before the concert was due to start that he might be lured away to a Roma celebration, but in the event he turned up and gave a great show, which cost me a lot of money to stage. Then at dinner in a restaurant afterwards he did an even better show — for no fee.” While in London he also gave a concert at the Mean Fiddler music venue.

The Belgrade promoter Srdjan D. Stojanovic and Sebastian Merrick, a London promoter, planned to present Bajramovic to a wider audience at the Barbican in the City of London in May this year, but the singer’s heart was deemed too frail. His last concert, due to be in Belgrade in April, also had to be cancelled because of his condition.

Near the end of his days Bajramovic reckoned that he had composed almost 700 songs. Some Gypsies attribute the Roma anthem, Djelem, djelem (I travelled, I travelled) to him; more likely it was composed by another Gypsy, Zarko Jovanovic.

Bajramovic has more claim to the authorship of the catchy Mesecina (Moonlight), which the Serb bandleader Goran Bregovic used on the soundtrack of Emir Kusturica’s film, Underground.

Bajramovic also performed the rollicking Bubamara (Ladybird), for Kusturica’s comedy Black Cat, White Cat. The singer used to complain that Bregovic was careless about authorship details, but it did not prevent their artistic collaboration. His tunes were often plagiarised by others, yet despite being urged to sue this easy-going man never did.

Bajramovic, who died in a cardiological clinic, is survived by his wife and their four daughters.

Saban Bajramovic, singer, was born on April 16, 1936. He died on June 8, 2008, aged 72