Duo Charma is an example of what happened with popular urban music in Greece in the wake of World War II.
Tolis Charmas (born Apostolos Charmantas) spent the late 1930s and early 1940s, playing guitar and baglama in Piraeus area taverns. In 1948, he met Litsa Zerva, and they formed Dou Charma, which gained much fame during the 1950s. They are credited with more than 100 recordings, mostly written by Tolis, although they were the first to record songs by Vasilis Tsitsanis, Apostolos Kaldaras and others. They also appeared, as themselves, in three movies.
Their first recordings, including this piece, which they wrote, were rebetiko, but their beautiful harmonies pointed to the laiko that was coming, and the success they would have with that genre.
(Note: One of the difficulties with transliteration from Greek to English is that there are some letters that look the same but sound quite different. One of those is X. In English, it is sometimes represented with an H and sometimes with a CH. The proper pronunciation of the Greek X is like the CH in Bach. The sound of the English X in Greek is from another letter entirely.)
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