Surinder Kaur was born at Lahore in 1929, began singing on All India Radio Lahore in 1943 at fourteen with her sister Prakash Kaur, and moved to Delhi in 1947.
She recorded several hundred Punjabi folk songs and is called the nightingale of Punjab. Latthe Di Chadar, Madhaniyan, Ja Ja Ve Mundeya are hers, and they are sung at Punjabi weddings on three continents.
She sang in Hindi films in Bombay in the late 1940s and left that work deliberately to record Punjabi folk full time, which cost her a much larger career.
Her repertoire is largely women's song, the wedding and departure songs in particular, sung by a woman who had herself left Lahore in 1947 and returned to it only decades later, with a cultural delegation.
Her daughter Dolly Guleria and her granddaughter continue the repertoire. She received the Padma Shri in 2006 and died the same year.
She and her sister Prakash Kaur recorded together from the 1940s and their versions of the wedding and separation songs became the standard ones.
She left film playback after a few years, saying the songs she wanted to sing were the ones her mother's generation had sung. Her whole career rests on that choice.
The songs she recorded were collected from ordinary singing rather than composed, and her recordings are now the only version many of them exist in.