She wants an old man to marry. He wants a princess from Morocco. And although they are different songs, both share the same melody.
We know that composers sometimes reuse bits and pieces of their works and, in some cases, repurpose whole works for other purposes. We saw that with Panagiotos Tountas and the four versions of a song written to try and overcome the censors in the late 1930s.
That wasn’t the first time for Tountas.
In 1933, Ismini Diatsente recorded Tountas’s The Old Man, one of at least four recordings that she did of Tountas songs. (Perhaps, most significantly, in 1928 she was one of the first to record My Doll, one of the early Smyrneika classics.) In the song, Diatsente tells her mother not to marry her off to a young man. She wants an old man.
I’ve found such a man, mother, let him marry me
And I’ll have a good time, with lots of caresses
Because he, mother, knows how to caress me more sweetly
More than young men, because he knows more
Three years later, in 1936, Stellakis Perpiniades recorded I want a princess, also credited to Tountas. The introductions of the two pieces differ but the melody of the verses is identical. And while the woman was looking for an old man, the male singer here is looking for a princess, because while Greek women are beautiful, they are also poor.
I want a princess,
From the depths of Morocco
…
She’s going to make me a king,
Out there in the Arab land
And everything she owns, will also be mine
Honey, you’re delightful
Tountas’s purpose seems clear: to tell the story of wants and desires from a woman’s and then a man’s perspective, while the melody locks the two together.
To me, the woman’s perspective – an older man who knows how to treat women – is more real. The man’s – for a Moroccan princess – seems like it may have come from spending a little too much time in the teke with a hookah.
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