She was the youngest of six children. Her father, a singer and drummer, performed at weddings, and her family encouraged her to learn Romany music while in elementary school.

In 1956, her school’s principal urged her to enter a music contest on Radio Skopje. She won. One listener was Stevo Teodosievski, an ethnic Macedonian composer and accordionist, who went on to become her mentor, manager, bandleader and, in 1968, her husband.

Mr. Teodosievski helped persuade Ms. Redzepova’s parents to let her go to Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia, where she studied for two years at the Academy of Music and then joined his ensemble. She promised her father she would not sing at bars or restaurants. She made her first album with the Ansambl Teodosievski in 1961, including “Chaje Shukarije,” which she had written when she was 9 years old.

Based in Belgrade, the group recorded and performed most extensively in the 1960s and ’70s: Roma traditional and traditionalist songs, Macedonian songs, even psychedelia-tinged pop songs. Ms. Redzepova became one of Yugoslavia’s first television-era pop stars, famous for her colorful turbans — she had more than 300 of them — as well as her voice.

She toured worldwide, becoming the first Yugoslav musician to appear at the Olympia in Paris and appearing repeatedly in Europe, the Americas and India, the ancestral home of the Roma people. (Hindi was among the languages she sang in.) At the first Gypsy World Music Festival, a gathering of Roma musicians from 23 countries held in India in 1976, she was crowned Queen of Romany Songs by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. In 2000, at the Festival of Roma Experiences in Moscow, she was named laureate and Roma Singer of the Century.

In 1989, as Yugoslavia was breaking up, she and her husband returned to live in Skopje. She continued to record, including a 1994 duet album with Usnija Jasarova, “Songs of a Macedonian Gypsy,” that was rereleased by Smithsonian Folkways in 2004.