Vangelis Prekas – lyricist, bouzouki player, composer and singer – is another of those musicians with limited online presence.
I’ve found out that he was likely born on the island in Syros in 1921. Throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, he wrote lyrics for dozens of songs, composed others and sang a few.
Despite a heavy presence in the discography – discogs.org reports 55 writing/composing credits and 12 releases as singer – there is little biographical information available.
The best-known song that he wrote lyrics for was probably Lukas Daralas’s The mountain. It’s a still-popular piece that helped launch the career of Kati Grey when she recorded it in 1954. Other versions were recorded by Vasilis Tsitsanis and Marika Ninou and, in America, by Theodoros Kavourakis. From the lyrics:
With the mountain I will become a friend
and with the pine trees.
And when I cry and hurt
the mountain will sigh.
The success of The mountain was such that it inspired Prekas to write the song Between two mountains, and to write the lyrics for and sing I leave the mountain.
He recorded with Crack the walls – one of his compositions – with Anthoula Alifragki in 1955.
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