There’s not much online trace of Elli Petridou, a singer from the late 1930s, but I finally tracked her down in Markos Vamvakaris’s autobiography.
Vamvakaris met her in the 1930s in Thessaloniki, after his first marriage broke down, while on tour. According to Vamvakaris, “I got to know Ellie in Vardhari in a house of ill fame….loved me like crazy and I loved her too. She was a beauty, petite but not too small, plump shapely and well dressed.” (From the translation by Noonie Minogue).
They returned to Athens as a couple. “We had good times together,” he remembered, “and since she sang a little I got her on to a recording.” In 1937 and 1938, she in fact recorded six songs with Vamvakaris that play an interesting role in his discography.
None of the six is hard-bitten rebetiko, which Vamvakaris did exceedingly well. They are lighter in music and words and deal primarily with love and longing. Most of the six are close in style to another genre popular at the time – cantadas, romantic serenades that spread to Athens from the Ionian Islands and that influenced the rebetiko repertoire.
In Faliro, Where You Bathe is a short tale of a man seeing the woman he desires bathing at Faliro (located south of Athens), but she is in the arms of another and can’t spare the singer even a glance.
In the end, Vamvakaris split with Elli and he writes that he lost track of her. So, apparently, did the history of rebetiko as told by the internet. But we have their six delightful songs, including In Faliro, Where You Wash, from 1937.
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