In a too-short career, Marika Ninou recorded 174 songs, singing the music of the greats of the late 1940s and 1950s and with the most popular singers of the day. Ninou, a Greek -Armenian (born Evangelina Atamian), is reported to have been born aboard a ship fleeing Smyrna.
Her rise to fame started in 1949: she’d been working in a cabaret act with her husband Nikos Nikolaidis, an acrobat, when a man named Petros Kyriakis heard her sing and introduced her to bouzouki player and composer Manolis Chiotis. She recorded two songs with him in 1948 and then was hired to work as a singer with Stellakis Peripiniadis.
A year later, she was working with Vasilis Tsitsanis, a partnership that produced some of her most memorable work (and he wrote about 30 per cent of the songs she recorded). Her’s was the voice on many of the pieces that defined post-rebetiko popular urban Greek music (laiko) of the 1950s. She also sang in three movies in the 1950s, further cementing her fame.
Ninou died of cancer in 1957 at the age of only 35. Tell Me Why You’ve Changed, a wronged lover’s lament, in 1950, is one of her late rebetiko classics, recorded with Stelios Keromitis, who wrote the song, and Tsitsanis on bouzouki.
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