Every so often while listening to music or researching the performers and composers, I’ll come across someone I’ve not heard a lot from or paid much attention to. It often turns out to be someone whose presence in the rebetiko discography is limited. Almost inevitably, I will come across a short newspaper article announcing the death of the performer and labelling him or her “one of the last of the old rebetes.”
That’s the case with Stelios Keralas, who died earlier this month at the age of 85 in Thessaloniki.
Keralas – his birth name was Stylianos Neiros – had performed in major “historic” clubs in Thessaloniki since the 1940s. According to Greek discography sites, his presence of record was limited to a couple of 45s, his participation with his daughter Marianna on her album Rebetiko No. 1, and the album Rebetamana Thessaloniki, with the singer Mario and the bouzouki player and composer Hondronakos.
(His daughter’s rebetiko album, released in 1978 is quite good. Here’s a sample.)
I like hearing these old voices. The singers and players may not have had a major impact on the development and continuation of rebetiko, and they may be largely absent from the discography, but they give me a sense of what it would have been like to sit in a tavern and hear the old-timers during the last years of the last century and the early years of this one: People who kept the spirit of the old rebetiko alive and made a career of taking that music to the people. They provide another link in the chain that stretches from the 1930s to today.
The castles of Yedi Koule, a song about an infamous prison in Thessaloniki, was written in the 1950s (amazingly to me that is almost 75 years ago now) by Giorgos Mitsakis, and recorded by Keralas in 1988 on the album Rebetamana Thessaloniki. I love the yearning and raw emotion in Keralas’s voice: he never lets up throughout the song.
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