Yiota Lydia is credited with 550 releases at the web site Discosg.org. She’s best known as one of the best-ever singers of Greek urban popular music – laiko for want of a better term – but among those recordings are Smyrneika and rebetiko recordings that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in the 1930s.
Giota Lydia – Panagiotia Mantaraki – was born in 1934 in New Ionia (a region of Athens, where she still lives) to parents who had fled to Greece from Asia Minor. She made her first recording at age 20 and her full, rich, emotive voice immediately attracted the attention of not only the record-listening public but of performers and composers. Over the next 50 years, she worked with Tsitsanis, Papaioannou, Chioti, Mitsaki, Bakali, Apostolos Kaldaras (who wrote What can I do, you’re handsome), George Dalaras and almost everyone else. She performed steadily until the late 1970s, at which point her main contribution to music was through recording.
What can I do, you’re handsome is interesting on two levels. One is that although Lydia (a nickname given her by a laiko composer early in her career) recorded it in 1965, it sounds much older. Unlike many other pieces of the time, the bouzouki playing was restrained and simple, and the recording was not over-orchestrated or drenched in reverb.
The other thing that sets this apart from the older rebetiko, while sounding much like, it is that the singer is a woman. Most of the older rebetiko songs featured only male singers; when women were present on the records they most often played the role of second voice.
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