Dimitris “Mitsos” Perdicopoulos recorded more than a hundred Greek songs in a variety of styles – including a sizeable repertoire of rebetiko – during his short life, but the thing he seems best known for was “discovering” Vasilis Tsitsanis.
Perdicopoulos was born in the Peleponnese in 1914. By the mid-1030s, he was a well-established singer of folk and Greek popular urban music. He had a sweet, warm, clear voice that suited the songs he chose, whether it was a Mainland syrto or an Athenian Smyrneika piece.
In 1934, he heard Tsitsanis performing at a trade fair in Trikala – Tsitsanis’s home town – and hired him to tour central Greece with his band. Back in Athens, when Tsitsanis arrived in 1935, Perdicopoulos got him a job and performed with him in local tavernas. Perdicopoulos also introduced Tsitsanis to recording executives and sang on Tsitsanis’s first recordings.
But he deserves credit for much more than that: he sang with the leading rebetiko performers of the day, performed the works of the major composers, and also wrote and arranged a number of songs. (It’s interesting that Perdicopoulos’s rebetiko recordings are among the few that feature clarinet, which was much more common in regional folk music at the time, suggesting his breadth of musical performance may have influenced those recordings.)
He died young, at age 38, leaving behind an extensive and rich discography that covers many of the musical styles of early 20th century Greece.
He recorded Damn You America, written by Stavros Pantelidis, in 1940. The song damns America for luring away all the young men and leaving Greek villages peopled only with mothers and unattached women.
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