We’ve briefly met Despina Arbatzoglou once before as the tobacco factory worker who married Dimitris Gogos and inspired his song Tobacco.
But she was more than a life-long partner: she also wrote lyrics and songs with and for her husband and the talented rebetiko and laiko musicians he worked with throughout his long and somewhat tragic career.
Gogos wrote the song Tobacco for Arbatzoglou in 1934 and recorded his first album in 1935. Dozens of the songs he recorded after that credited Arbatzoglou as the lyricist. It’s difficult to determine exactly what her role was, though. At some sites for some songs she is credited only as a lyricist, at others, for the same song, she is credited as the composer as well. It seems likely that the two enjoyed a long creative partnership as well as a marriage, with both contributing to the songs they created.
Perhaps not surprisingly, while there is plenty of information online about Gogos, there is a paucity of biographical data about this song-writing wife. We know where she worked, that they met and married, and that she stayed with him throughout his life, including the desperate period after his blindness and loss of public profile.
They call me names, which she is variously credited with the songwriting or only the lyrics, was recorded in 1940. The lyrics are three sets of couplets:
They call me names and accuse me
They don’t know my pain and they laugh at me
How I ended up, how no one knows
What my aching heart has and suffers
My luck wanted it so that now I’m here
And sighing and hurting and always remembering you
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