His songs accompanied millions of Poles as they fell in love, confessed their feelings, had fun and experienced deep emotions. He was one of the most well-known and loved Poles of the 20th century. On 5 April 2021, Krzysztof Krawczyk passed away.

It was six months after Krzysztof’s death that day. Twilight was falling over the small rural cemetery in the woods adjacent to a holiday village, Grotniki near Łódź, where he was buried. Every available surface within one kilometre was cluttered with cars – plate numbers from all over Poland. The cemetery resounded with the singer’s voice coming from a CD player. The glow of lanterns was visible from afar. It was difficult to push through to the artist’s grave, as it was surrounded by a huge circle of people who sang along with him, held hands and cried. “Is it often so crowded here?” I asked the man who was lighting candles on his family grave. “There are fewer people on weekdays, but they always swarm during the weekends. They will stand like this and sing until late at night.”

Krzysztof Krawczyk came from a family of actors. His mother, Lucyna, and father, January, played on dramatic stages and often toured the countryside. Krzysztof moved with his parents from town to town. He lived in Katowice, then in Białystok, and then in Poznań. They led a poor life. From Łódź, little Krzysiek remembered that he often stopped near a restaurant just to smell the aroma of pork chops, which the family could not afford. In Poznań, as a musically talented kid, he played one of the scouts in the film Satan from the Seventh Grade, based on a novel by Kornel Makuszyński. For fourteen days of shooting, he was paid three thousand zlotych, which was a large sum. And, just as importantly, the same film also starred Pola Raksa, the movie idol of the time.

As a result of various turbulences, Krzysztof took his advanced secondary school examination (matura) at a school for adults. The upside was that he met Sławomir Kowalewski there, who shared his passion for rock’n’roll. When the two started playing together, Kowalewski fantasised, “You’ll see, one day Lucjan Kydryński himself will be announcing us.” The dream came true, and much sooner than the boys had expected.

For the time being, however, there were four of them playing at the Łódź cultural centre. Following the example of the Beatles, they took different roles. Marian Lichtman became the drummer as he was the only one with a dad rich enough to buy a drum kit for his son. Krzysztof became the lead singer because when he sang Byłaś tu the girls usually had to wipe their wet eyes. The group named themselves the Troubadours (Trubadurzy). It was a bit unluckily because Estrada in Łódź required them to wear corresponding outfits. And although the combination of a musketeer and troubadour costume was designed for them by Szymon Kobyliński himself, the clothes were thick, uncomfortable, and cloaked with a thick cape. After every performance, the boys would leave the stage covered in sweat. But when they played their covers of the Beatles’ songs at the first concerts, the audience got so excited that enlarged militia squads – with dogs! – had to be brought in to calm the crowd down. Slowly, the Troubadours created their own hits. When the band sang their song called Przyjedź, mamo, na przysięgę, they had to encore a dozen or so times. A concert record was set in Jelenia Góra. On Saturday and Sunday, the Troubadours gave six and seven performances in a row respectively at the local community centre.

The band sang many songs styled on Polish or Russian folklore, though they always wore the costumes of French musketeers. It wasn’t particularly appreciated in Poland, but the Soviet Union loved it. The Troubadours were as popular there as the Beatles and the local band Piesniary. The Troubadours’ records released by the Soviet company Melodia were sold out in millions. The band made a good living from it, as they were paid in dollar bills, accepted in Pewex. But when the Russians began paying the band’s fees in rubles, the boys bought dollars and gold on the local black market to smuggle into Poland, which was not always successful.

Unfortunately, the Troubadours’ formula was slowly running out, and the band was falling apart. At that time, Krzysztof was given the opportunity to record a solo album with the record label Polskie Nagrania. However, a well-received album is one thing, and a solo career is another. At first, things were going uphill. Krzysztof was singing in a restaurant near the Congress Hall in Warsaw. “I was changing clothes among potato peelers and dancers,” he recalled years later. He started to do a little better when the announcer Irena Dziedzic called him “the Polish Tom Jones” on the stage in the Forest Opera during the Sopot Festival. This gave him a kind of a trademark. He gave concerts and recorded, recorded and gave concerts. And produced hit after hit: Pamiętam ciebie z tamtych lat, Rysunek na szkle, Jak minął dzień. When he ran out of ideas for another song during a session in 1975, Krawczyk took out a crumpled piece of paper with a rhyme given to him by his satirist friend Tadeusz Drozda at the time of the performances in the Soviet Union. It was a story about the friend’s grandfather’s river trip in a steamboat. The melody was written in fifteen minutes, and Krzysztof recorded Parostatek (“steamboat”), a song symbol of the blissful 1970s.

Throughout his artistic life, Krawczyk learned from his elders. Mieczysław Fogg taught him that a vocalist must take care of his throat over the whole course of his career. Lucjan Kydryński, a compere, told him that a singer should always wear tailored trousers and clean shoes because he never knows who is watching him. An actor Adolf Dymsza advised him on how to get rid of stage fright. Apparently, before entering the stage, one should squeeze their buttocks tightly and when the performance starts, gently relax them. Then, serenity will automatically appear on one’s face.

When Urszula Sipińska asked Krzysztof genially how he saves the day when a concert turns out to be a complete dud, he answered with all simplicity, “I’ve never had such a concert.” In his memoirs, he added, “I noticed that people did not get bored with me. And even if there were no stairs, I would jump off the one and a half metres stage and kiss ladies’ hands and men’s bald spots. This caused laughter. I took the children in my arms. I simply wanted to win that audience over.”

Later, he started to give more and more concerts abroad. First in East Germany, then in the USA. It was the beginning of the 1980s, the time of the great Solidarity boom, also in the States. Krzysztof recorded a song there called Solidarity, hoping that it would carry him on the wave of worldwide interest in the Polish issue. This enthusiasm was curbed by Michał Urbaniak, a Polish jazzman who was well established on the American market. When asked if Krzysztof had any chance of a career in the States, Urbaniak replied, “None!”. He added that it would only be possible if Krzysztof were a beautiful eighteen-year-old girl who would sweep some millionaires off their feet.

Krawczyk ended up earning dollars singing in local Las Vegas bars for various spendthrifts who came there in the evenings to knock themselves out after a day of work or partying. It was because the Polish community hated when Krzysztof used Presley’s language on stage – they preferred him singing his native “wodoreedee”. “I gave ten years of my life to America because it intoxicated me like a drug, enslaved me with Elvis Presley’s voice, kidnapped me in its melting pot, drove me to a bar, seduced me with the beauty of a wealthy maiden and – let’s face it – rejected my advances,” he recalled years later. But the balance of his stay overseas was positive because in America Krzysztof met Ewa, his future wife and good spirit. “I met Ewa at a time of a total mental breakdown. I ran away into drugs, abused medication. Then a wonder woman appeared, who chided me about all my crap and announced, “I will be your drug addiction.” They met in a Polish club, where he sang, and she worked as a barmaid.

When the signer returned to the country in the mid-1980s, a columnist Krzysztof Teodor Toeplitz wrote in Polityka that “Krawczyk has returned to the country. The situation is continuously getting back to normal.” Poland had changed, and so had the musical tastes of Krawczyk’s compatriots. He had to come up with a new idea for himself. One such attempt was to record a domestic version of Julio Iglesias and Willie Nelson’s hit To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before. Krawczyk took over the role of Iglesias, while Bohdan Smoleń, who had overslept for the recording and, not quite awake, rasped out Nelson’s parts. It contrasted perfectly with Krzysztof’s pathetic vocal. It turned out that Poland had not forgotten him. His carol recital, broadcast on TV on Christmas Eve in 1986, was watched by fourteen million viewers, becoming the most-watched programme in the past year.

And the concerts began again. Krzysztof was chronically exhausted, and in June 1988, during one of his night drives, he hit a tree on the road near Bydgoszcz. During his rehabilitation, he became close to Church. The malicious used to day that Krawczyk turned religious because he banged his head on the steering wheel. But his conversion, albeit slow, was consistent and lasted until the end of his life. Soon, Krawczyk started recording psalms, an idea suggested to him by a well-known Dominican from Poznań, Father Jan Góra.

“What the world has given us, fate has unexpectedly taken away…”

Around 1989, the singer was getting back on his feet, just like the rest of Poland. He had to find his place somewhere between the raging disco polo and young rock bands, for whom he was something like an excavation site in an open-air museum. So Krawczyk sang sentimental songs like Gdy nam śpiewał Elvis Presley or Italian canzoni. Some Serbian managers came up with an idea of creating a duet with their star of the day, Goran Bregović. The latter was already known for his collaboration with his compatriot, director Emir Kusturica (a creator of the famous movie titled Underground ). After the first recordings, Goran’s Serbian manager used the word she heard most often in Poland: “Zajebiste!” [translator’s note: a swear word expressing enthusiastic appreciation]. Indeed, Bregović’s song Mój przyjacielu became a nationwide hit. So much so that Krzysztof was only able to accept 20% of the concerts he was invited to give in the country.

As the years passed, Krawczyk began to try on an entirely new repertoire: he started singing songs by Leonard Cohen and even Bob Dylan. “Close to the end of my life’s race, I don’t look for the finish line. As a religious person, I know that there is no finish line before me, but a horizon towards which I am heading,” he wrote on the cover of the album that summarised his career. Krawczyk was glad that he had time to record it before the Covid-19 epidemic, which in its first onslaught paralysed the country. He wrote, “We want to defeat Covid-19 with the hope glowing from the album’s words.”

Yet, on Easter Monday, 5 April 2021, the whole of Poland learned that Krzysztof Krawczyk passed away due to complications from covid. During the funeral ceremony, letters from admirers of his talent were read out:

“Dear Krzysztof!

We travelled thousands of kilometres with you.

We danced for hundreds of nights with you.

We spent many days missing with you.

We loved you.

Our grandparents did.

Our parents did.

We did.

Our children did.

We all say goodbye with an aching heart.”

Wiesław Kot

The article was firstly published on dlapolonii.pl portal.

Picture: Facebook Krzysztof Krawczyk