The folk song about her — written by Miroslav Ilić — is a telling artifact of how her story circulated in Yugoslav popular culture. Miroslav Ilić was a genuine figure in Serbian folk music, not a state-sponsored propagandist; the song represented a popular cultural response to her survival that was distinct from the official state recognition. The fact that both existed — the Tito decoration and the folk song — suggests that her story resonated at multiple levels of Yugoslav society simultaneously, from the official to the genuinely popular.
This dual circulation is characteristic of how stories acquire cultural staying power. Official recognition alone tends to produce a kind of formal deference that can fade when the political context changes. Popular cultural incorporation — a song that people actually sang, that circulated in the informal networks of everyday life — produces a different kind of longevity. Vulović remained a recognized figure in Serbian culture through the political upheavals of the late 1980s and 1990s partly because her story had been incorporated at both levels.
The fact that she used her celebrity to oppose Milošević in the 1990s was, in its own way, a continuation of the political dimension that the Tito decoration had inaugurated. She had been made a public figure by the state; she used that public figure status against the next state that succeeded the one that had recognized her. The irony is not subtle, but it is genuine: the woman Yugoslavia had decorated as a national hero used her platform to campaign against the nationalism that was destroying Yugoslavia’s successor states.