Giorgos Mitsakis was one of the younger generation of rebetiko performers who became one of the stars of laiko. He was a bouzouki player, singer and composer and he excelled at all three.
Mitsakis, who was born in Istanbul, was still a teenager when he went to Thessaloniki, where he met Tsitsanis, Vamvakaris and others. He moved on to Piraeus, arriving in 1939 and beginning his singing career.
He started writing songs shortly after and it is reported that over the course of his career, more than 700 songs that he wrote were recorded. Throughout his career, which stretched into the 1980s, he collaborated with the best-known artists, first of rebetiko and then of the emerging popular laiko.
I’ve found two nicknames for Mitsakis — The Poet, for the quality and authenticity of his lyrics, and The Teacher, for his role as a band leader in the 1950s and beyond and for the influence he had on the musicians around him.
The Tavern was one of his late rebetiko songs, recorded with Ioanna Georgakopoulou in 1947.
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