Soula Kalfopoulou, as lead singer or accompanying vocalist, recorded dozens of songs through the late 1940s and into the early 1960s – working with leading singers of the time – yet there is no biographical information that I could find online, in either Greek or English.
That isn’t the case of her brother, Spyros, who was lauded as “one of the last guard of old rebetiko” when he passed away in 2006. From the details of Spyros’s life, we can deduce that Soula was born into a refugee family in the early 1920s in either Piraeus or Nea Ionia, a suburb of Athens.
It’s reported that Soula sang on the first recording of a composition by her brother, made after he returned to Athens from exile (he had been punished for his role in the Greek civil war that followed WWII). While Spyros was writing songs for Stella Haskil and other emerging stars of what was to become laiko, Soula was recording and writing the music for a handful of songs. I can’t find a definitive count, but one YouTube channel dedicated to her work has 54 songs.
In the 1960s, she disappears from recordings, which cannot be due to any change in musical tastes: Her style and ability to harmonize fit solidly into the popular urban music of the time. It seems possible that, as was the case with some of the other female singers I have researched, she retired from making music when she married.
Soula’s discography leans heavily toward laiko, but there are a number of late rebetiko recordings, such as this one, written in by Apostolos Kaldaras, that also features the voices of Markos Vamvakris and Stelios Peripiniades.
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