Markos Vamvakaris: The Man and the Bouzouki

"This is one of the greatest books I have ever read. It’s greater than another more famous memoir, by Yannis Makriyannis, a hero of the war of independence, which has been, for more than a century, like a Holy Bible to the Greeks. But Vamvakaris’s memoirs are the most earnest and honest descriptions of his life, of the life of somebody who belongs to the underworld, who was born a Roman Catholic in 1905 on the small island of Syros. He was very poor and worked as a slaughterer, but at the same time he was a musician. He played the bouzouki [a then-unpopular mandolin-like instrument brought to Greece in the 1900s by immigrants from Asia Minor]. He was very gifted and he created Rebetiko – a whole new musical style. It’s something like the blues in America – the melody is very simple. The spirit is: ‘we belong to the underworld, we live against, or beneath, the law; we like to stroll around and smoke marijuana; we love women’, and the women in Rebetiko are much more liberated than women in other songs. You could say that Vamvakaris’s memoirs are like The Greek Lady Sings the Blues by Billie Holiday. But on top of that, when Vamvakaris dictated his memoir, when he was 70 years old, he turned out to be a gifted narrator. The memoir is extremely good, extremely significant. He describes real life in Greece at the point where the working-class meets the underworld, before the Second World War. The writing is raw, straightforward – not lyrical or poetical in a stylistic way, but poetical in a cultural way: it’s about the way he lived his life. The book is not very well-known. But Vamvakaris is remembered as the patriarch of folk music. He is a giant. Look him up on YouTube—one song, ‘The Roman Catholic Girl from Syros’, is like the second national anthem."