Haralambos Vassiliades wrote lyrics for both light music and rebetiko/laiko, beginning in the 1940s.
Discogs.com credits Vassiliades with 54 songs and/or lyrics, but he was likely responsible for more. An article at Ogden.gr argues lyricists were often overlooked in recording credits. “Who would have ever imagined that Charalambos Vassiliadis, who officially – due to the informal agreements – is supposed to be the lyricist of 86 songs, would finally have a ‘secret’ oeuvre many times more than the one listed? ” (Original in Greek)
Vassiliades, born in Asia Minor, trained as a translator and worked for the Greek navy, but his passion was writing lyrics. His first success came just before World War II, and his career grew when recording resumed in the late 1940s.
Vassiliades earned the nicknamed Tsantas: He’d show up at musicians’ hangouts with a briefcase full of lyrics for them to consider. (Tsanta is the Greek word for handbag.) He collaborated with most of the leading composers and the stars of the 1950s and ’60s sang his lyrics.
Ioanna Georgakopoulou and Stelios Kiromytis recorded In front of Saint Spyridon, in 1940, one of Vassiliades’s first appearances in the discography. The story is simple – the singer is taken with a young woman he sees in front of Saint Spyridon church. (The lyrics were credited to Vasilis Tamvakis, a pseudonym he used that combined part of his last name and his wife’s maiden name.)
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