Legends of Sinhala Music
The singers, lyricists and composers whose work became the memory of a nation. Read their lives, and the songs they left behind.
The Great Names
Featured1890s-1920sJohn de Silva
Lyricist · Poet
The Kotte lawyer who turned Sinhala theatre into a machine for making songs — and whose nurthi melodies, sung nightly on Colombo stages, became the first Sinhala songs a whole country knew.
Featured1920s-1940sKumaratunga Munidasa
Poet · Lyricist · Researcher
The grammarian who counted Sinhala syllables until they became a metre — and whose Hela prosody, slogan and pupils gave Sunil Santha's generation the idiom they sang in.
Featured1920s-1970sDevar Surya Sena
Singer · Researcher · Composer · Broadcaster
Born Herbert Charles Jacob Pieris and trained as a Cambridge barrister, he gave up the Bar to walk into Sri Lankan villages, collect folk songs and vannam, and write them down in Western staff notation.
Featured1930s-1990sMarcelline Jayakody
Lyricist · Poet · Composer
The Catholic priest who put lotus flowers on a church altar, wrote hymns that Buddhists sing, gave Lester James Peries's Rekava its songs, and became known across Sri Lanka as the priest of the temple.
Featured1930s-1960sAnanda Samarakoon
Singer · Composer · Lyricist
The schoolmaster-painter who wrote Sri Lanka's national anthem, watched the state alter its opening words without asking him, and said his head had been taken off and another put in its place.
Featured1930s-1960sChandraratne Manawasinghe
Lyricist · Poet
The twice-ordained monk turned astrologer-journalist who wrote Sri Lanka's first radio opera, invented a new Sinhala metre, and put song lyrics into print so they would be read as literature.
Featured1930s-1980sLionel Edirisinghe
Composer · Music Director · Researcher
The first Sri Lankan to take a Visharada at Lucknow and the founding principal of the state music college — and the composer of an anthem that won a competition he was judging.
Featured1940s-1990sEdiriweera Sarachchandra
Lyricist · Poet · Researcher
The Peradeniya scholar who went back to the despised village nadagam, learned its tunes from a Balapitiya master, and out of them built Maname and Sinhabahu — the sung plays that gave Sinhala its most-loved theatre songs.
Featured1940s-1980sWally Bastiansz
Singer · Lyricist · Composer · Musician
The Colombo traffic policeman who put Sinhala words to the 6/8 kaffrinha rhythm, added a chorus, and invented the mass genre of Sinhala baila out of nurses, jilted lovers and army marches.
Featured1940s-1980sSunil Santha
Singer · Composer · Lyricist · Music Director
He sang the first song Radio Ceylon ever cut to disc, then walked away rather than be re-auditioned by a visiting Indian professor — and lost fifteen years of his career for it.
Featured1930s-1990sMohideen Baig
Singer
A Tamil-speaking Muslim from Salem who became the defining voice of Sinhala Buddhist devotional song — heard at almost every Vesak pandal in the country for seventy years.
Featured1940s-1970sC. T. Fernando
Singer · Composer
Church chorister, radio artist and self-taught melodist who spliced Western pop and jazz onto the Sinhala song and, in doing so, invented Sri Lankan pop music.
Featured1940s-1980sW. B. Makuloluwa
Researcher · Composer · Music Director
The Kandyan schoolmaster who spent seven years writing down village songs, argued that Sinhala music should be built from them rather than from Hindustani raga, and got folk melody written into the school syllabus.
Featured1930s-1970sRukmani Devi
Singer
Born Daisy Rasammah Daniels to a Tamil Christian family, she became the defining female voice of Sinhala song's first era and the first star of Sinhala cinema.
Featured1950s-1990sSiri Gunasinghe
Poet · Lyricist · Researcher
The Peradeniya Sanskritist whose 1956 collection Mas Le Nathi Ata broke Sinhala poetry out of the four-line stanza, and whose one film, Sath Samudura, produced one of the greatest of all Sinhala songs.
Featured1940s-2010sW. D. Amaradeva
Singer · Composer · Musician · Music Director
The Moratuwa carpenter's son who welded North Indian raga to Sinhala village song and, over six decades on radio and in film, gave the island a music it agreed to call its own.
Featured1950s-1990sVernon Corea
Broadcaster
The Golden Voice of Radio Ceylon, who put Sinhala pop onto the English service, championed local musicians in his EMCEE column, and became the first Asian in BBC senior management.
Featured1940s-1990sMadawala S. Ratnayake
Lyricist · Poet · Producer · Broadcaster
The poet Radio Ceylon hired as a scriptwriter in 1954, who put village folk song on the national station, vetted every lyric before it went on air, and wrote Min Dada Hi Sara for Amaradeva.
Featured1950s-1970sMahagama Sekera
Lyricist · Poet
Painter, translator, novelist and film-maker, but above all the lyricist who taught Sinhala song to carry serious poetry — and who then turned on his own beautiful illusions and wrote against them.
Featured1940s-1980sKarunaratne Abeysekera
Broadcaster · Lyricist · Poet
The voice of Sinhala radio for three decades, a lyricist of thousands of songs, and the man who had to invent Sinhala words for cover drives and leg byes before he could commentate on cricket.
Featured1950s-2000sShelton Premaratne
Composer · Music Director · Musician
The composer who set out to stop Sinhala songwriters borrowing Hindi tunes: music director for twenty-one films and more than thirty stage plays, including Henry Jayasena's Hunuwataye Kathawa.
Featured1950s-2010sSisira Senaratne
Singer · Lyricist · Composer · Music Director
The customs officer who wrote his own melodies while everyone around him was borrowing Hindi ones, and who with his wife Indrani Wijebandara made the songs Sri Lankan children still learn.
Featured1950s-1980sH. R. Jothipala
Singer
For three decades almost every Sinhala film hero sang in the same voice — his. Rejected three times in one year for sounding wrong, Jothipala became the country's most-loved playback singer.
Featured1960s-2000sPremasiri Khemadasa
Composer · Music Director · Musician
Self-taught on a cheap bamboo flute and never formally trained, Khemadasa Master rebuilt Sinhala film scoring, wrote symphonies and a Buddhist cantata, and invented Sinhala opera out of nothing.
Featured1950s-2000sLionel Ranwala
Musician · Singer · Researcher · Composer
The schoolteacher who carried W. B. Makuloluwa's folk-collecting project onto the stage, put a drum band into a Sri Lankan school for the first time, and released his first record at sixty.
Featured1950s-2020sSanath Nandasiri
Singer · Composer · Musician · Music Director
The Gothatuwa schoolboy who sang on Radio Ceylon at thirteen, trained in Lucknow, and spent six decades doing two jobs at once — filling concert halls and teaching the people who would fill them next.
Featured1960s-2010sVictor Rathnayake
Singer · Composer · Music Director
The singer who invented the Sri Lankan solo concert. His one-syllable show 'Sa' opened in 1973 and closed 39 years later, in the same hall, on its 1,450th night.
Featured1960s-1990sClarence Wijewardena
Singer · Composer · Musician · Music Director
The guitarist who plugged Sinhala song into an amplifier — founder of the Moonstones, the Golden Chimes and the Super Golden Chimes, and the man most often called the father of Sinhala pop.
Featured1950s-2020sNanda Malini
Singer
The singer who moved Sinhala song from romance to protest and back again, whose concert series filled halls for decades and whose death in August 2026 brought three days of national mourning.
Featured1960s-2020sDesmond de Silva
Singer · Musician
The Matara boy who sang with Colombo's sharpest pop bands and then gave himself to baila, becoming the genre's most bankable voice for half a century on four continents.
Featured1960s-1990sMilton Mallawarachchi
Singer · Composer · Musician
The romantic voice of Sri Lankan radio in the 1970s, who sang on the last 78 rpm records made for non-film songs and on what is remembered as the country's first Sinhala music cassette — and never once left the island to perform.
Featured1960s-2000sGunadasa Kapuge
Singer · Composer · Music Director · Broadcaster
The gravel-voiced singer the state broadcaster could not keep and could not silence. Sacked, arrested, exiled to a provincial service, he answered with a one-man show he played a thousand times.
Featured1960s-2020sNihal Nelson
Singer · Composer · Lyricist
The Moratuwa singer who was introduced on air in 1963 as a voice that would last forever, and spent sixty years proving it — cassette-era baila king and, by most counts, the most recorded Sri Lankan artist of all.
Featured1960s-1980sPremakeerthi de Alwis
Lyricist · Broadcaster · Poet
He failed a Radio Ceylon singing audition and was hired for his speaking voice instead, then wrote lyrics for more than 150 films before he was shot dead at his Homagama home in 1989.
Featured1960s-2020sSunil Ariyaratne
Lyricist · Researcher · Poet
Lyricist, film director and the most consequential scholar Sinhala music has produced — the man who wrote Nanda Malini's protest songs and then made baila academically respectable.
Featured1960s-2020sNeela Wickramasinghe
Singer · Composer · Music Director
The four-time Sarasaviya winner whose voice carried 'Master Sir' for thirty years, who taught schoolgirls music for twenty-three, and who died in office as Sri Lanka's Consul General in Milan.
Featured1960s-2010sThe Moonstones
Band
The Ratnapura beat group that put Sinhala words to electric guitars and invented Sinhala pop, on a borrowed recording slot and a single 1968 EP that outsold everything around it.
Featured1960s-2020sThe Gypsies
Band
The Ratmalana family band that made baila the sound of every Sri Lankan wedding, dance and election year — five brothers, a father who managed them like a business, and half a century of songs the state radio sometimes refused to play.
All Profiles (149)
Featured1890s-1920sJohn de Silva
Lyricist · Poet
The Kotte lawyer who turned Sinhala theatre into a machine for making songs — and whose nurthi melodies, sung nightly on Colombo stages, became the first Sinhala songs a whole country knew.
Featured1920s-1940sKumaratunga Munidasa
Poet · Lyricist · Researcher
The grammarian who counted Sinhala syllables until they became a metre — and whose Hela prosody, slogan and pupils gave Sunil Santha's generation the idiom they sang in.
1900s-1950sP. B. Illangasinghe
Lyricist · Researcher
The Gampola notary and musicologist who wrote the words of Ceylon's first national anthem — and who was also sitting on the panel that judged the competition his entry won.
Featured1920s-1970sDevar Surya Sena
Singer · Researcher · Composer · Broadcaster
Born Herbert Charles Jacob Pieris and trained as a Cambridge barrister, he gave up the Bar to walk into Sri Lankan villages, collect folk songs and vannam, and write them down in Western staff notation.
1930s-1960sRaipiyel Tennakoon
Poet · Lyricist · Researcher
Kumaratunga Munidasa's chief disciple and the Hela Havula's second leader, whose satirical poem Vavuluva mocked a German professor's Sinhala grammar and whose verse Sunil Santha turned into a protest song.
Featured1930s-1990sMarcelline Jayakody
Lyricist · Poet · Composer
The Catholic priest who put lotus flowers on a church altar, wrote hymns that Buddhists sing, gave Lester James Peries's Rekava its songs, and became known across Sri Lanka as the priest of the temple.
1930s-1980sVincent Somapala
Composer · Lyricist · Researcher
Son of a nadagam player, pupil of Sadiris Master, and the scholar who wrote the Sinhala music-theory textbooks that a whole generation of teachers and singers learned their grammar from.
1930s-1960sSagara Palansuriya
Poet
The monk-turned-poet known as Kayes who rebuilt Tennyson's Enoch Arden as a Sinhala village romance, taught at Nalanda and Ananda, and sat in Parliament for Horana.
Featured1930s-1960sAnanda Samarakoon
Singer · Composer · Lyricist
The schoolmaster-painter who wrote Sri Lanka's national anthem, watched the state alter its opening words without asking him, and said his head had been taken off and another put in its place.
Featured1930s-1960sChandraratne Manawasinghe
Lyricist · Poet
The twice-ordained monk turned astrologer-journalist who wrote Sri Lanka's first radio opera, invented a new Sinhala metre, and put song lyrics into print so they would be read as literature.
Featured1930s-1980sLionel Edirisinghe
Composer · Music Director · Researcher
The first Sri Lankan to take a Visharada at Lucknow and the founding principal of the state music college — and the composer of an anthem that won a competition he was judging.
Featured1940s-1990sEdiriweera Sarachchandra
Lyricist · Poet · Researcher
The Peradeniya scholar who went back to the despised village nadagam, learned its tunes from a Balapitiya master, and out of them built Maname and Sinhabahu — the sung plays that gave Sinhala its most-loved theatre songs.
Featured1940s-1980sWally Bastiansz
Singer · Lyricist · Composer · Musician
The Colombo traffic policeman who put Sinhala words to the 6/8 kaffrinha rhythm, added a chorus, and invented the mass genre of Sinhala baila out of nurses, jilted lovers and army marches.
Featured1940s-1980sSunil Santha
Singer · Composer · Lyricist · Music Director
He sang the first song Radio Ceylon ever cut to disc, then walked away rather than be re-auditioned by a visiting Indian professor — and lost fifteen years of his career for it.
1940s-1980sLivy Wijemanne
Broadcaster
The Radio Ceylon announcer who became the first Ceylonese to run its Commercial Service, built the outside-broadcast and talent-finding machinery behind Sinhala song, and ended as chairman of the SLBC.
1930s-1960sP. B. Alwis Perera
Poet · Lyricist
The schoolboy dropout who founded Colombo's poets' society at eighteen, edited the island's best-selling poetry magazine, and wrote the book that made romantic love a respectable subject in Sinhala verse.
1930s-1960sMeemana Premathilake
Poet
Colombo-era poet, editor of Silumina and founding editor of Sarasaviya — the man who put the poems in the schoolbook and then built the newspaper that judged the arts.
Featured1930s-1990sMohideen Baig
Singer
A Tamil-speaking Muslim from Salem who became the defining voice of Sinhala Buddhist devotional song — heard at almost every Vesak pandal in the country for seventy years.
1930s-1962Wimalaratne Kumaragama
Poet
The revenue officer who made poetry out of the Wanni — its mortuary attendants, cattle thieves and village tanks — and who could answer a complaint at the kachcheri in improvised verse.
1940s-2000sArisen Ahubudu
Lyricist · Poet · Researcher
The schoolmaster and Hela Havula purist who changed his own name into pure Sinhala, taught for forty-two years, and wrote lyrics of such stripped-down Sinhala that Amaradeva built a classic on them.
1950s-2000sGerald Wickremesooriya
Producer
The bookshop owner who founded Sooriya Records, Sri Lanka's first local label, held weekly auditions in his own front room, fought the state broadcaster's ban on 'thuppahi music' in the press, and started paying Sri Lankan musicians royalties.
Featured1940s-1970sC. T. Fernando
Singer · Composer
Church chorister, radio artist and self-taught melodist who spliced Western pop and jazz onto the Sinhala song and, in doing so, invented Sri Lankan pop music.
1940s-1980sP. L. A. Somapala
Singer · Composer · Music Director · Producer
The Radio Ceylon sitar player who put a saxophone into Sinhala song and was mocked as a brass-band musician for it — and who, with his wife Chithra, made the most recorded duo of the 1940s and 50s.
Featured1940s-1980sW. B. Makuloluwa
Researcher · Composer · Music Director
The Kandyan schoolmaster who spent seven years writing down village songs, argued that Sinhala music should be built from them rather than from Hindustani raga, and got folk melody written into the school syllabus.
Featured1930s-1970sRukmani Devi
Singer
Born Daisy Rasammah Daniels to a Tamil Christian family, she became the defining female voice of Sinhala song's first era and the first star of Sinhala cinema.
1930s-1970sR. A. Chandrasena
Musician · Composer · Music Director · Producer
A twelve-year-old who talked his way into Radio Ceylon and could play anything put in front of him, then spent thirty years teaching the musicians everyone else remembers.
Featured1950s-1990sSiri Gunasinghe
Poet · Lyricist · Researcher
The Peradeniya Sanskritist whose 1956 collection Mas Le Nathi Ata broke Sinhala poetry out of the four-line stanza, and whose one film, Sath Samudura, produced one of the greatest of all Sinhala songs.
1950s-1990sC. de S. Kulatilake
Researcher · Broadcaster · Composer
Sri Lanka's first systematic ethnomusicologist, who took over the SLBC's music research unit in 1972, carried a tape recorder into the villages, and wrote down what Sinhala traditional singing actually is.
1940s-1980sR. Muttusamy
Music Director · Composer · Musician · Singer
A Tamil violinist from Nagercoil who played on the first Sinhala talkie, stayed, and spent thirty-five years writing the music for the Sinhala cinema that followed.
Featured1940s-2010sW. D. Amaradeva
Singer · Composer · Musician · Music Director
The Moratuwa carpenter's son who welded North Indian raga to Sinhala village song and, over six decades on radio and in film, gave the island a music it agreed to call its own.
1940s-1980sDharmadasa Walpola
Singer · Musician
The dominant male playback voice of 1950s and 1960s Sinhala cinema, a flute, violin, tabla and harmonium player who left school to make masks, and half of Sinhala film music's most famous duet partnership.
1940s-1950sLeela Asoka
Singer
One of the schoolgirls who sang Ananda Samarakoon's song at the birth of an independent Ceylon, and the woman whose voice answers Sunil Santha's on some of his best-loved duets — until a husband asked her to stop.
Featured1950s-1990sVernon Corea
Broadcaster
The Golden Voice of Radio Ceylon, who put Sinhala pop onto the English service, championed local musicians in his EMCEE column, and became the first Asian in BBC senior management.
Featured1940s-1990sMadawala S. Ratnayake
Lyricist · Poet · Producer · Broadcaster
The poet Radio Ceylon hired as a scriptwriter in 1954, who put village folk song on the national station, vetted every lyric before it went on air, and wrote Min Dada Hi Sara for Amaradeva.
Featured1950s-1970sMahagama Sekera
Lyricist · Poet
Painter, translator, novelist and film-maker, but above all the lyricist who taught Sinhala song to carry serious poetry — and who then turned on his own beautiful illusions and wrote against them.
1950s-1980sChitrananda Abeysekera
Broadcaster · Lyricist · Poet
The SLBC's Director of Sinhala Services for twelve years, who ran the department that commissioned and graded the sarala gee repertoire while quietly writing hit lyrics of his own.
1940s-2000sG. S. B. Rani Perera
Singer · Producer · Broadcaster
A fourteen-year-old Malay girl who walked into a Colombo recording studio in 1944 as a spectator and walked out with two records — then spent sixty years singing, producing radio and being punished for her politics.
Featured1940s-1980sKarunaratne Abeysekera
Broadcaster · Lyricist · Poet
The voice of Sinhala radio for three decades, a lyricist of thousands of songs, and the man who had to invent Sinhala words for cover drives and leg byes before he could commentate on cricket.
1930s-2010sVivienne de Silva Boralessa
Singer
The gramophone-era child star who became the defining female voice of Sinhala Buddhist devotional song, sang at three Buddha Jayanti commemorations, and never made it to the Madras studios.
Featured1950s-2000sShelton Premaratne
Composer · Music Director · Musician
The composer who set out to stop Sinhala songwriters borrowing Hindi tunes: music director for twenty-one films and more than thirty stage plays, including Henry Jayasena's Hunuwataye Kathawa.
1950s-2000sJayatissa Alahakoon
Composer · Music Director · Musician
A Tower Hall actor's son who learned the violin, sat in the pit for Maname, and then spent six decades writing music for the Sinhala stage and for the films of G. D. L. Perera.
1950s-1980sM. K. Rocksamy
Musician · Music Director · Composer
The violinist, saxophonist and tabla player who spent thirty years in the back row of Sinhala film music sessions before becoming one of its busiest music directors.
1950s-2010sAnil Mihiripenna
Musician · Composer
The Santiniketan-trained flautist and esraj player who became the first Sri Lankan to hold degrees in both instruments, and spent forty years teaching North Indian classical music in Colombo.
1950s-2000sNarada Disasekara
Singer · Musician · Music Director
The Radio Ceylon sound engineer who became a singer, sang three songs in Sri Lanka's first colour film, and walked away with the very first Sarasaviya Award ever given for playback singing.
1950s-1990sDayananda Gunawardena
Lyricist · Producer · Broadcaster
Playwright, lyricist and radio producer known as 'Jubal', who built a Sinhala stage-song style out of village folk melody in Nari Bena, and spent nearly thirty years shaping SLBC radio drama.
1940s-2020sLatha Walpola
Singer
The Nightingale of Sinhala song. A convent girl slapped for singing on the radio, she became the voice of Sinhala cinema and helped end its dependence on singers shipped in from Madras.
1950s-2010sNimal Mendis
Singer · Composer · Music Director
The Colombo songwriter who reached Top of the Pops in 1968, then wrote two of the best-loved songs in Sinhala — 'Master Sir' and 'Ganga Addara' — in English first.
1950s-1990sPatrick Denipitiya
Musician · Composer · Music Director
The man who brought the sliding Hawaiian guitar into Sinhala song, and who — with Rocksamy and Latiff — sat in on so many film and radio sessions that his playing is on records nobody credits him for.
1950s-2010sIndrani Wijebandara
Singer
The voice on the two songs from Rekava that Sri Lankan children have been singing ever since, and half of the Sisira–Indrani partnership that pulled 1950s Sinhala song away from borrowed Hindi tunes.
1950s-2000sLionel Algama
Composer · Musician · Music Director · Singer
Composer, sitarist and teacher who spent eighteen years building a stringed instrument of his own design — the Sree Veena — while scoring films, ballets and three decades of Colombo schoolboys' anthems.
1950s-2020sRohana Beddage
Singer · Lyricist · Composer · Researcher
The village dance teacher who turned swing-songs, harvest chants and cart-drivers' verse into recorded Sinhala songs, and then spent sixty years writing down the folk music he had grown up inside.
Featured1950s-2010sSisira Senaratne
Singer · Lyricist · Composer · Music Director
The customs officer who wrote his own melodies while everyone around him was borrowing Hindi ones, and who with his wife Indrani Wijebandara made the songs Sri Lankan children still learn.
Featured1950s-1980sH. R. Jothipala
Singer
For three decades almost every Sinhala film hero sang in the same voice — his. Rejected three times in one year for sounding wrong, Jothipala became the country's most-loved playback singer.
1950s-1990sM. S. Fernando
Singer
The singer who took baila off the beach and into the film studio and the wedding hall — hailed as Baila Chakrawarthi, and the butt of decades of respectable disapproval.
1950s-2000sAnton Jones
Singer · Lyricist · Composer
The baila singer who turned the news into dance music — writing songs about a murdered beauty queen, a hijacked airliner and a massacre of novice monks, and setting them to a six-eight beat.
1960s-2000sHenry Caldera
Singer · Composer · Lyricist
Blind from fourteen, he learned music from Sunil Santha at the Seeduwa blind school and wrote his own songs — among them the nonsense-rhyme children's favourite Thara Patiya.
Featured1960s-2000sPremasiri Khemadasa
Composer · Music Director · Musician
Self-taught on a cheap bamboo flute and never formally trained, Khemadasa Master rebuilt Sinhala film scoring, wrote symphonies and a Buddhist cantata, and invented Sinhala opera out of nothing.
1950s-1990sFreddie Silva
Singer
The comedian who sang: a Moratuwa boy whose satirical songs with Premakeerthi de Alwis made a nation laugh, and who died forgotten in a garage a mile from where he was born.
1950s-1980sJ. A. Milton Perera
Singer · Composer · Musician
The leading male playback voice of Sinhala cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, and the acknowledged master of shoka gee — the songs of heartbreak that a whole generation played when it had nothing else to say.
1940s-2010sAmara Ranatunga
Singer · Composer · Researcher
The Heywood's first female classical music student, who became a Hindustani-trained concert vocalist, a composer, and a professor heading the departments that trained the next generation.
1950s-2010sAngeline Gunathilake
Singer
The Silver Bell of Sinhala cinema — a Sunil Santha pupil and SLBC A-grade artist who gave her voice to the actresses of more than two hundred films across six decades.
1960s-1980sBandara K. Wijethunga
Lyricist · Poet · Broadcaster
The Radio Ceylon relief announcer with the famous deep voice who wrote 'Mahada Namathi Wana Bambara', won a Presidential award for film lyrics, and lost his broadcasting job for signing a petition.
1950s-2000sDharmasiri Gamage
Lyricist · Poet
A Lankadeepa sub-editor at eighteen who spent forty years writing for newspapers by day and lyrics by night, giving Khemadasa, Amaradeva and Nanda Malini some of their most durable songs.
Featured1950s-2000sLionel Ranwala
Musician · Singer · Researcher · Composer
The schoolteacher who carried W. B. Makuloluwa's folk-collecting project onto the stage, put a drum band into a Sri Lankan school for the first time, and released his first record at sixty.
1950s-1980sShelton Perera
Singer · Musician · Music Director · Broadcaster
The Colombo tabla player who trained at Lucknow, played on Hindi film sessions in Bombay, and came home to become a film composer, the SLBC's first Hindi announcer and an award-winning singer.
1960s-2010sAjantha Ranasinghe
Lyricist · Poet · Broadcaster
A schoolboy who sent Buddhist verses to Radio Ceylon and became a Lake House editor, writing more than 400 songs and lyrics for nearly 60 films while holding down the day job.
1960s-2000sSomathilaka Jayamaha
Singer · Lyricist · Composer · Broadcaster
A village boy from Kuliyapitiya who walked into the Broadcasting Department in 1959 and spent the next half-century singing, writing and setting tunes to Sinhala songs from inside it.
1980s-presentYamuna Malani Perera
Lyricist · Poet
One of the very few women with a large catalogue of Sinhala song lyrics — including Ahasa Polawa and Rosa Thol Sibimi — in a trade that had no visible female writers at all until the 1980s.
1960s-2000sStanley Peiris
Composer · Musician · Music Director
The saxophonist from Kandy whose twin-horn instrumental became the first Sinhala pop record without a singer, and who then spent thirty years writing melodies for everybody else.
1960s-2020sLucien Bulathsinhala
Lyricist · Poet · Broadcaster
Dramatist, poet and lyricist whose Tharavo Igilethi filled halls across the country in 1981, and whose songs — from Sandun Sihina Mandapaye onwards — were written by a man twice pushed out of the public service.
Featured1950s-2020sSanath Nandasiri
Singer · Composer · Musician · Music Director
The Gothatuwa schoolboy who sang on Radio Ceylon at thirteen, trained in Lucknow, and spent six decades doing two jobs at once — filling concert halls and teaching the people who would fill them next.
1960s-1990sSarath Dassanayake
Composer · Music Director · Musician · Producer
The sitar player in Khemadasa's studio orchestra who became one of Sinhala cinema's most prolific composers, credited with music for roughly 150 films and 600 film songs.
1950s-2020sSujatha Attanayake
Singer · Music Director · Musician
The Golden Bell of Sinhala song: the playback voice of hundreds of films, a singer in nine languages, and the first Sri Lankan woman to sit in the music director's chair.
1960s-2020sV. Hemapala Perera
Musician
Blinded as a child by a reaction to a school vaccination, he became the only musician graded at the top level by Sri Lankan radio on five instruments, and the flute on countless Sinhala recordings.
Featured1960s-2010sVictor Rathnayake
Singer · Composer · Music Director
The singer who invented the Sri Lankan solo concert. His one-syllable show 'Sa' opened in 1973 and closed 39 years later, in the same hall, on its 1,450th night.
Featured1960s-1990sClarence Wijewardena
Singer · Composer · Musician · Music Director
The guitarist who plugged Sinhala song into an amplifier — founder of the Moonstones, the Golden Chimes and the Super Golden Chimes, and the man most often called the father of Sinhala pop.
Featured1950s-2020sNanda Malini
Singer
The singer who moved Sinhala song from romance to protest and back again, whose concert series filled halls for decades and whose death in August 2026 brought three days of national mourning.
1970s-presentSunil Sarath Perera
Lyricist · Poet
A lyricist who wrote for Amaradeva and Sanath Nandasiri, a poet with strong and unfashionable opinions about what a Sinhala lyric even is, and a persistent critic of how songwriters are paid.
1960s-2020sVijaya Corea
Broadcaster
The Radio Ceylon announcer who stepped in for a sick colleague in 1964, stayed sixty years, became the SLBC's Director-General, and used the English service to put Sinhala pop bands on the air.
Featured1960s-2020sDesmond de Silva
Singer · Musician
The Matara boy who sang with Colombo's sharpest pop bands and then gave himself to baila, becoming the genre's most bankable voice for half a century on four continents.
1960s-1990sK. D. K. Dharmawardena
Lyricist · Broadcaster
A radio announcer who was also one of the most-sung lyricists of his generation — writing for Amaradeva and Victor Rathnayake in one register and for Milton Mallawarachchi in another, and leaving almost no biography behind.
1970s-presentKumaradasa Saputhanthri
Lyricist · Broadcaster · Poet
A lyricist who turned one coastal village — its paddy field, its river, its cinnamon and rubber and forest grove — into the landscape behind five hundred Sinhala songs, most of them set to music by one friend.
Featured1960s-1990sMilton Mallawarachchi
Singer · Composer · Musician
The romantic voice of Sri Lankan radio in the 1970s, who sang on the last 78 rpm records made for non-film songs and on what is remembered as the country's first Sinhala music cassette — and never once left the island to perform.
1970s-2010sPiyasara Shilpadhipathi
Musician · Researcher
A Kandyan drummer and dancer who became a university lecturer, recorded all eighteen vannam with his wife Chandrakanthi, and carried Sri Lankan traditional performance to lecture halls in California.
1970s-2020sPriya Suriyasena
Singer · Composer · Music Director · Producer
A schoolteacher whose first four songs went out on the SLBC in 1972 and made him famous overnight, then kept a 700-song sarala gee career going for five more decades.
1970s-2020sT. M. Jayaratne
Singer · Musician
A school music teacher with a violin who was talked into singing folk songs for the radio, and ended up with four Presidential awards and one of the most-played duets in Sinhala cinema.
Featured1960s-2000sGunadasa Kapuge
Singer · Composer · Music Director · Broadcaster
The gravel-voiced singer the state broadcaster could not keep and could not silence. Sacked, arrested, exiled to a provincial service, he answered with a one-man show he played a thousand times.
1960s-2020sAmarasiri Peiris
Singer · Musician
The SLBC violinist who became a singer by accident, when the vocalist booked for a Khemadasa session failed to turn up and the man holding the violin was asked to try.
Featured1960s-2020sNihal Nelson
Singer · Composer · Lyricist
The Moratuwa singer who was introduced on air in 1963 as a voice that would last forever, and spent sixty years proving it — cassette-era baila king and, by most counts, the most recorded Sri Lankan artist of all.
1960s-2020sAnnesley Malewana
Singer
The voice on almost every Sinhala pop record that mattered between 1968 and 1978: the Moonstones' lead singer, Clarence Wijewardena's partner in the Super Golden Chimes, and the Prince of Sinhala Pop.
1960s-2010sD. D. Gunasena
Musician · Singer · Music Director
The session violinist heard on decades of Sinhala recordings and on Amaradeva's overseas tours, who learned the instrument in secret at home because he was not allowed to touch it.
Featured1960s-1980sPremakeerthi de Alwis
Lyricist · Broadcaster · Poet
He failed a Radio Ceylon singing audition and was hired for his speaking voice instead, then wrote lyrics for more than 150 films before he was shot dead at his Homagama home in 1989.
1960s-2020sSaman Chandranath Weerasinghe
Lyricist · Poet
A newspaperman first and a lyricist by night, he wrote the dawn broadcasts that woke Sri Lanka up, gave Sunil Edirisinghe his first radio song, and turned a geometry lesson into a hit.
1970s-2020sDharmarathna Perera
Lyricist · Poet
A newspaperman who invented a second name for a verse column in the youth paper Kumari — and found that Sri Lanka came to know the pen-name, Devinda Dasanayake, far better than his own.
1950s-2000sMalani Bulathsinhala
Singer
A radio child artist at ten who became one of the leading light-music voices of the 1970s to 1990s, Hindustani-trained and equally at home in soul, and who died suddenly in Los Angeles at 51.
1970s-2020sRohana Weerasinghe
Composer · Music Director · Musician
The sitar player from Khemadasa's orchestra who became the most-recorded melody writer in Sinhala music, scoring films, teledramas and four decades of hit songs.
Featured1960s-2020sSunil Ariyaratne
Lyricist · Researcher · Poet
Lyricist, film director and the most consequential scholar Sinhala music has produced — the man who wrote Nanda Malini's protest songs and then made baila academically respectable.
1960s-2020sSunil Edirisinghe
Singer
A printing-corporation clerk sang one song for his brother's film in 1969, then went to India for a music degree and came back as one of the most disciplined voices in Sinhala classical song.
1960s-2010sH. M. Jayawardena
Composer · Musician · Music Director
The flautist from Siyambalanduwa who failed his first audition at the state radio, then spent forty years writing the melodies that Amaradeva, Nanda Malini and Sunil Edirisinghe sang.
Featured1960s-2020sNeela Wickramasinghe
Singer · Composer · Music Director
The four-time Sarasaviya winner whose voice carried 'Master Sir' for thirty years, who taught schoolgirls music for twenty-three, and who died in office as Sri Lanka's Consul General in Milan.
1970s-2020sRambukana Siddhartha Thero
Lyricist
A Buddhist monk who spent fifty years writing song lyrics, from Kapuge's devotional classics to a bitter verse about labourers, and won Sarasaviya and Derana awards for his film songs.
1970s-2010sPaul Fernando
Singer · Composer
The Prince of Baila — a Moratuwa boy who won a talent contest in 1969 and spent the next forty years on open-air stages, dancing sideways across the boards while he sang.
1970s-2020sEdward Jayakody
Singer · Composer · Music Director
A Kegalle church chorister who became one of Sri Lanka's most recorded voices, a music teacher in the state service, and the creator of Marambari, a solo concert he has played on four continents.
1960s-2020sSunil Perera
Singer · Composer · Musician
The Gypsies' frontman and Sri Lanka's Baila Chakrawarthi, who put caste, religion, corruption and hypocrisy into dance songs and kept singing them after the state broadcasters stopped playing them.
1960s-2020sIndrani Perera
Singer
The schoolgirl the Moonstones went looking for when they needed a woman's voice for Dilhani — and who stayed to become the third member of what Sooriya Records called the original Sinhala pop trio.
1970s-2020sRathna Sri Wijesinghe
Lyricist · Poet
A poet who took a science stream, failed his university entrance and then wrote some of the finest Sinhala song lyrics of the century — for Kapuge, for Amaradeva, for Sunil Edirisinghe.
1970s-2020sMariazelle Goonetilleke
Singer · Musician · Broadcaster
The voice of Kandy Lamissi, the first Singlish hit and briefly a banned one — and the first mainstream Sri Lankan woman to sing baila that was written to be danced to.
1970s-2020sRookantha Gunathilake
Singer · Composer · Lyricist
A composer who became a singer by accident, and then one of the biggest cassette-era voices in Sri Lanka — remembered as much for what was done to him and his wife in 2001.
1980s-2000sChandralekha Perera
Singer
The cassette-era pop singer who came out of a youth-services choir to record duets with Vijaya Kumaratunga and Rookantha Gunathilake, and who survived an armed attack on her home that ended in ten convictions.
1960s-2010sMignonne Fernando and the Jetliners
Band · Singer · Composer
The Colombo band that started out imitating the Shadows in 1961 and became the country's most travelled musical export, and the singer EMI signed in London in 1969.
1990s-2010sVipul Dharmapriya Jayasekara
Lyricist · Broadcaster
The SLBC announcer and lyricist who wrote 'Ahas Gabe Tharukata Gane' and 'Sagawanna Epa Hasarali', and who died at the studio door minutes after signing off his last morning programme.
1980s-2020sWasantha Kumara Kobawaka
Lyricist
A lyricist who published one hundred and twenty-one songs in twenty-eight years and was teased for it by Sunil Ariyaratne — the writer behind Rookada Madu, Palanchiye Lee Iruwe and Weralu Gediya.
1980s-2020sDeepika Priyadarshani Peiris
Singer
A schoolgirl duet for a scholarship fund made her famous overnight; three decades later she is a Bhatkhande-trained vocalist, a career music teacher, and the only Sri Lankan singer to receive the Gusi Peace Prize.
1960s-2010sLa Bambas
Band
Six Moratuwa boys who were booed off a Galle Face nightclub stage in 1966, then spent forty-seven years refusing to plug anything in — and recorded the largest Latin American repertoire any Sri Lankan band has put on record.
Featured1960s-2010sThe Moonstones
Band
The Ratnapura beat group that put Sinhala words to electric guitars and invented Sinhala pop, on a borrowed recording slot and a single 1968 EP that outsold everything around it.
1960s-2000sDharmaratne Brothers
Band
Four brothers from College Street, Kotahena, billed as the first all-family Sinhala pop group — and the only band of the guitar era that deliberately played a rabāna instead of congas.
1980s-2020sNalin Perera
Singer · Composer · Musician
The Chilaw schoolboy who formed Marians to back singers at a school competition in 1988 and invented the unplugged concert format that changed how Sri Lanka listens live.
Featured1960s-2020sThe Gypsies
Band
The Ratmalana family band that made baila the sound of every Sri Lankan wedding, dance and election year — five brothers, a father who managed them like a business, and half a century of songs the state radio sometimes refused to play.
1990s-2020sWasantha Dukgannarala
Lyricist · Broadcaster · Producer
The lyricist behind Ahankara Nagare and Mal Pan Podak, who put Sinhala words to the hip-hop and R&B records of the 2000s — and who is far less documented than his three hundred songs deserve.
1970s-2020sGolden Chimes and Super Golden Chimes
Band
Two bands, not one: the group Clarence Wijewardena built out of the wreckage of the Moonstones and then left behind, and the one he formed afterwards with Annesley Malewana.
1990s-2020sNilar N. Cassim
Lyricist · Poet · Broadcaster
A Muslim boy from Matara whose mother tongue was Tamil, who took a first-class honours degree in Sinhala and became one of the most-recorded Sinhala lyricists of the last thirty years.
1990s-2020sNirosha Virajini
Singer · Music Director
One of the most recorded female voices of the teledrama and film era, singing in four languages and taking best-vocalist awards across three decades — under a stage name the reference sites keep mistaking for her real one.
1990s-2020sDinesh Subasinghe
Composer · Musician · Music Director
A Colombo violinist who rebuilt a bowed instrument nobody in Sri Lanka still played, wrote the first Buddhist oratorio, and became one of the busiest film and television composers of his generation.
1990s-presentIraj Weeraratne
Producer · Singer · Composer · Musician
The producer who put rap on Sinhala radio. His debut cassette sold eight thousand copies in two days, and for a decade afterwards he was the gatekeeper of Sri Lankan hip hop.
1990s-presentKasun Kalhara
Singer · Composer · Producer · Musician
Born to a singer and a composer, trained by Khemadasa, and famous for refusing to sing at weddings — the voice that made a generation of Sri Lankan listeners expect their pop music to be strange.
2000s-presentRanidu Lankage
Singer · Composer · Producer
The Royal College schoolboy turned Yale economics student who built the Sinhala R&B idiom out of a bedroom keyboard, and whose 'Ahankara Nagare' put a Sinhala single onto the BBC.
1980s-2020sUresha Ravihari
Singer
The child who sang beside her own teacher on a 1989 film soundtrack and grew into the most-heard female playback voice in modern Sinhala cinema, with Sarasaviya's top vocal award three years running.
2000s-2020sShihan Mihiranga
Singer · Composer · Lyricist · Producer
The sound engineer's son who came fifth on Sri Lanka's first televised singing contest and then out-sold the winner, writing and producing his own songs before judging a decade of contestants himself.
2000s-2020sUmaria Sinhawansa
Singer
Pop, R&B and jazz singer who came up through Bathiya and Santhush's studio, coached a winning team on The Voice Sri Lanka, and is constantly confused with her older sister Umara.
2010s-2020sYohani
Singer · Composer
The singer whose 2021 cover of Manike Mage Hithe carried a Sinhala song onto the UK Asian Music Chart and into Bollywood — and whose supposed feud with the original singer never happened.
1990s-2020sBathiya and Santhush
Band · Singer · Composer
The Colombo duo who spent twenty-five years welding Sinhala melody to hip hop, invented a genre name for it, and turned themselves into the most commercially successful act in Sri Lankan pop.
2000s-2020sAshanthi De Alwis
Singer · Producer
The rapper inside Bathiya and Santhush who stepped out and made Sandawathuren, the first hip-hop solo album by a Sri Lankan woman, and later turned her songs towards depression and harassment.
1980s-2020sAthma Liyanage
Singer · Musician · Composer
The singer who made a whole album by himself on a keyboard in 1989, gave the cassette era one of its lasting hits in Liyathambara, and found a second audience twenty years later.
1960s-1980sAugustus Vinayagaratnam
Lyricist
The Tamil lyricist from Panadura who turned Nimal Mendis's English songs into Sinhala — and whose own name cannot be reliably spelt in either language.
1990s-2020sChanna Jayanath
Lyricist
The lyricist who wrote every song on Sudu Araliya Mala, the best-selling Sinhala cassette of its era, while holding down a full-time job as a general manager at the company that released it.
1970s-presentKularatne Ariyawansa
Lyricist · Producer · Poet
The Ananda College schoolboy who hawked his poems round the newspaper offices of Colombo, then wrote some of Amaradeva's best-loved songs and helped build the cassette industry that carried them.
1960sLos Caballeros
Band
The band that put Paraguayan and Spanish guitar rhythms under Sinhala words and seeded the whole group-song movement — then lost its leader, Neville Fernando, in 1968, and was largely written out of the story it started.
1970s-2020sMahinda Chandrasekara
Lyricist · Poet
The schoolteacher-lyricist from Medawachchiya whose most-loved song is played every Teachers' Day, although he wrote it as an attack on what teaching had become.
Mohammed Gauss
Composer · Music Director
The India-born composer who scored Asokamala in 1947 with melodies of his own instead of borrowed Indian ones, and who gave Amaradeva, Mohideen Baig and Latha Walpola their first film work.
1960s-2010sNihal Bharathi
Broadcaster
The soft-voiced Radio Ceylon announcer whose request programmes were heard across the subcontinent, who was trained by Vernon Corea and hired by Livy Wijemanne, and who ended up running the English Service.
1990s-2020sPraneeth Abeysundara
Lyricist · Researcher
A professor of sociology at Sri Jayewardenepura who also writes popular song lyrics — for Milton Mallawarachchi, Sanath Nandasiri and Nanda Malini — and edits a Buddhist magazine.
1970s-2010sPriyananda Wijesundara
Lyricist · Broadcaster
The schoolboy who posted his lyrics to singers' home addresses and borrowed stamp money from friends, then wrote Gunadasa Kapuge's first hit and close to two thousand songs after it.
1980s-presentRavibandhu Vidyapathy
Musician
Sri Lanka's best-known drum master, trained by Chitrasena and by the geta bera guru Piyasara Shilpadhipathi, who introduced a new drum called the Kala Beraya in 1997 and took Kandyan percussion to WOMADelaide.
Sadiris Master
Singer · Musician
The nurthi stage's leading singer-actor, who took the lead in John de Silva's plays, sang on the earliest Sinhala gramophone records, and taught the man who set Cumaratunga's Hela Miyasiya to music.
1970s-2010sSaman Athaudahetti
Lyricist · Broadcaster
Broadcaster, dubbing artist, travel writer and lyricist — the man behind Gulliver's Sinhala voice, and behind songs for Sunil Edirisinghe, Gunadasa Kapuge and Amarasiri Peiris.
2000s-2020sShehan Galahitiyawa
Lyricist
A Kandy garage-owner's son who copied out English pop lyrics by hand as a schoolboy and became one of the busiest commercial lyricists of the 2000s — and one of the least documented.
1970s-2020sSohan Weerasinghe
Singer · Composer · Lyricist
The lawyer who took over a two-year-old band in the mid-1970s and turned Sohan & the X-Periments into the anchor act of Colombo's nightclub and hotel circuit.
Somadasa Elvitigala
Composer · Music Director
The composer of Sinhala art cinema's breakthrough decade — eleven films between 1965 and 1976, among them Sath Samudura and Welikathara — about whom almost nothing personal is recorded.
1940s-1980sThevis Guruge
Broadcaster
Radio Ceylon's first Sinhala-language announcer, who joined in 1949 and rose to run the SLBC and ITN, and who was shot dead on a Narahenpita street in July 1989.