Singer-guitarist József Dinnyés has passed away.
His sister, Ágnes Dinnyés, announced the news on her social media page. According to the post, József Dinnyés died on Monday.
József Dinnyés was born on August 4, 1948 in Szeged. He started singing in 1963, and in 1966 he was a founding member and lyricist of the first Szeged band singing in Hungarian, the Angels. In 1967, he became nationally known with the song Karrier, written together with Miklós Veress, with which he won 2nd place at the first Hungarian pol-beat festival. For a while, he was referred to as the Hungarian Bob Dylan or "Bob Dinnyés" of his songs with guitar, harmonica, and public life themes, despite the fact that Bob Dylan was on completely different paths at that time and Dinnyés was also increasingly interested in Hungarian poetry.
In addition to two poems by Ferenc Buda and one by Morgenstern, his first single in 1973 featured his only own composition, Aranyos emberek. In the 1970s, on the one hand, his programs were characterized by the duality of setting poems to music and his own songs, and on the other hand, while he gave countless concerts throughout the country, and was even a regular performer at official celebrations and KISZ camps, the Magyar Hanglemezgyártó Vállalat refused until 1985 to make an LP with him , the title song "Határtalanul" was also censored. Five years after the release of the record, he released the 35-song album Kín és dac on the poems of poets. This was followed by Ezt nem fujta a għal (1992), Töretlen hittel (2000), and 14 cassettes of folk ballads, psalms, and sung poems.
Aranyalmás Publishing House, founded in the 1990s, published one after another the works it had collected over the years. He edited a series of lectures from five centuries of Hungarian-language poetry. He founded a free school, within the framework of which he introduced the trinity of history, literature and music to interested small communities. He visited the country's settlements and the Magyar-inhabited areas of the Carpathian Basin as a true folk cultivator.
In 2001, the publication of his oeuvre series, planned for 24 CDs, began. In 1988, a volume titled My Songs was published, about which János Sebők wrote a book entitled The Song Owner.
He played an active role in the preservation of tradition: as the organizer of the Teacher's Memorial Tree movement, he has already erected almost a hundred memorial trees so that "we don't forget the past".
József Dinnyés was awarded the title of Knight of Hungarian Culture in 2001. In 2018, the civilian section of the Hungarian Order of Merit was awarded the Knight's Cross.
