Driving through the town of Steelton, Pennsylvania and you’ll see banners hanging from utility poles that proudly read “many nations, one people.” It’s a truism that could apply to just about any American city, but here it is especially accurate.

For over a hundred years, waves of immigrants came to work in the steel mills that gave the place both its name and its tough, hard-working reputation; Italians, Irish, German, Hungarian, Serbian, Croatian. In recent years, scores of new African-American and Latino residents have made Steelton their home.

As children, Mike “Misko” Furjanic, Lenny Tepsich, Chris Radanovic, and Danilo Yanich all grew up surrounded by this intoxicating cultural mix. And in their homes, that meant tamburitza; the driving, spirited, celebratory folk music of the Balkans.

As grownups, they perform as Sviraj (pronounced “svee-rye,” with a rolled ‘r’), bringing the Balkan music of their heritage to audiences across the United States and Canada at festivals, weddings, social clubs, dance conventions, and cultural events since 1988.

Regarded as one of the premier tambura groups in the country, they have released five CDs through Minneapolis folk label Omnium Records, including a couple of rollicking live sets. Their latest is Zumba Zai, boasting a rich collection of songs steeped in the musical traditions of Southeastern Europe, a region long fought over by empires and travelled by traders.

In the old countries of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Hungary the music lightened an otherwise difficult and often tenuous life. In American towns like Steelton, the music livened picnics, parties, social clubs, church gatherings, weddings, living room gatherings and back porch jams, played by men and women with hands hardened from making steel and keeping homes, but whose hearts remained soft to the thoughts of a land left behind.

In any one song can still be heard Roma, Klezmer, Turkish, and European and Mediterranean sounds. The melodies came from fiddle, accordion, and from one or more members of the tamburica family, a multi-tonal class of fretted instruments unique to the Balkans that includes the guitar-like bugaraji and celo, the mandola-like brac, and the tiny mandolin-like prim.

Like the music itself, many of these instruments (otherwise rare in America) are passed down in families over many generations. “I can’t remember a time when music wasn’t a part of our lives, when it wasn’t in our homes” says Tepsich, who plays celo and dumbek in the group and recalls his Steelton childhood fondly. “When we were kids, everybody played music. At every kind of family or church event there was music.” For all four men, the story was largely the same.

Some of Radonovic’s earliest memories are of his parents dancing to tambura music.
“I remember them dancing when I was just a kid running around on the floor of the church hall.”

After earning a master’s degree in music performance, he performed in orchestras and opera companies throughout the region. Asked to join Sviraj five years ago as bass player, he proved an easy convert, even if at first he found it difficult to play without charts of any kind.

“I just couldn’t comprehend at first how you could changes keys in the middle of the song without sheet music,” he remembers of his early Sviraj shows. “But then somebody told me to get my head out of the music and just play. And since then it’s become a way to stay connected to my parents and to my grandfather who moved here back in 1913.”

The youngest member of the group, Radanovic saw Sviraj while still in high school. “I just thought they played the coolest music.” In Furjanic’s home, immersion in the music started at an early age. “We didn’t have a choice,” he laughs. “We all played. Everybody played something.”

As a teenager, Misko performed in a band with his parents and made two trips to Croatia. There, he soaked up the culture, learned the violin styles of Slavic masters, and brought back with him many of the songs that would become a cornerstone of Sviraj’s expansive repertoire. His mother Catherine was one of the most important musicians in Steelton.

“My mother is a pretty well-known violinist and singer, and she taught me. She taught us all. Everybody in the area knew her,” says Furjanic. Catherine at one point influenced or mentored just about every musician in Steelton, including a fifteen year-old Yanich, who was learning from her when Misko was still a baby.

He was also altar boy at Tepsich’s baptism. “So this music, this life for us goes back a long way,” says Yanich, who plays bugaraji in the group. “It’s a great place to be from.”

And it’s a place whose musical history runs deeper than most can remember. Strong evidence shows that when tamburu music came to America, it landed first in Steelton. Frank Hoffer, an instrument maker from Croatia, settled in the town in 1893, and soon after formed a tambura group that eventually included his four daughters. A small street in town bears his name.

By the time the members of Sviraj were all grown men, however, the town had long since past its industrial glory days. In June of 1972, Hurricane Agnes flooded the Susquehanna. The West Side neighborhood, where Tepsich grew up, was washed away by 30 feet of churning water. The mills recovered, but much of the town did not.

Over the next decade, half of America’s steel jobs disappeared anyway. The four-mile long complex along the river that once employed over 5,000 was sold by Bethlehem Steel in 2002 after being idle for nearly two years. The factory’s new owners employ about 700.

On Sundays, feast days, and for special events, the churches and social halls in town still fill up with families, some who still call Steelton home and some who have moved on. On the whole the town itself has been getting younger, smaller, and poorer for years.

For Sviraj, playing the music that made this town culturally renowned is both a way to keep close the Steelton they knew and loved, as well as to keep it alive. At conventions, music, dance, and cultural festivals, the quartet plays alongside tambura bands from much larger towns with significant Slavic heritage; Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago, New York, Toronto.

“Everybody who plays tambura knows Steelton,” says Furjanic. “We’re definitely on the map. Even though the town is only big enough to support two or three bands, on its own, groups from all over the country come here because they know the people who love it are here. And some bands from overseas as well.”

And Srivaj does its part to take a piece of Steelton everywhere they perform. And more often than not, despite the language barrier and the funny-looking instruments, audience members respond.

Yanich recalls a West Indian dancer at an event ten years ago. “She was dancing the whole time doing her own steps, even though she had never heard our music before. And because of this she got everybody else onto the dance floor. We wanted to take her on the road with us.” As Yanich says, it is not uncommon at their shows for the music to make that kind of connection with people who have never heard it before.

On a Sunday evening in April, Sviraj performs at the wedding reception of Torin and April Dragas at the Croatian Union of America’s St. Lawrence Hall in Steelton. It is one of several ethnic social clubs in town that have persisted, just a few steps across the road from the rusting hulk of the shuttered mill.

Torin explains why he chose Sviraj to perform instead of a cover band or a disc jockey. “This is the music of our families, our heritage, and Sviraj is the hands down the best.” Then he puts it even more succinctly. “Do you really need to hear “Electric Slide” again?”

Over drafts of Yeungling and shots of Slivovitz, he explains how the music his grandfather knew as a boy in Yugoslavia is as important to him, someone who has only visited the place once.

Just then, someone calls out for a kolo, a traditional dance tune ubiquitous in Balkan traditions. Sviraj happily obliges. Torin points to the dancers as they join hands and step in syncopated patterns in a slow, clockwise circle.

“Half these people have been doing this their whole lives,” he says, seeing neighbors, friends, and relatives of various ages dancing together. “And half of them have never done anything like this before. But look. They’ve holding hands, they’re smiling. This is togetherness. This is connection.”