Ruhi Su led two musical lives. With his thundering baritone, it's no surprise that he started out as an opera singer. As an outspoken political activist in the ‘50s, he spent five years in jail, and afterward he ended up pursuing his passion for Turkish folk music. That big, booming voice of his turned out to be the ideal companion to his own virtuosic saz playing, and he became famous for bringing a modern—sometimes even Western—sensibility to traditional Anatolian tunes.