SONGS FROM THE OLD GREEK UNDERWORLD (ΔΙΓΛΩΣΣΗ ΕΚΔΟΣΗ ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ - ΑΓΓΛΙΚΑ)

ΑΝΘΟΛΟΓΙΑ

The songs in this book are a sampling of the urban folk songs of Greece during the first half of the 20th century. They are the creative expression of an urban subculture whose members the Greeks commonly called rebetes.

These rebetes were people living a marginal and often underworld existence on the fringes of established society, disoriented and struggling to maintain themselves in the developing industrial ports, despised and persecuted by the rest of society. And it is the hardships and suffering of these people, their fruitless dreams, their current loves and their lost loves that these songs are about, and underlying them all, their jaunty, tough will to survive.

The appeal of these songs, often compared to the American blues, is that the conflicts they express are not exclusively Greek conflicts, they are everybody's; and they are still unresolved - in urban Greece as in urban Anywhere.

Preface to the second edition
Foreword
Rebetika
The Music of the Rebetes
The Dances of the Rebetes
Rebetika and Blues
Collection of Song Lyrics
Musical Examples
Glossary of Transliterated Words
Song Index
Contributors