Sotiria Bellou, born on the island of Evia in 1921, moved to Athens in 1940. She worked a variety of jobs, including one in a rebetiko club. Reportedly, she sang two songs there one night after a bet with a customer. A young musician who heard her introduced her to Vasilis Tsitsanis, a musical relationship that launched her on a career that made her a favourite of Greek audiences.
In 1947, after the resumption of recording in Athens, she recorded her first album to immediate critical and popular success. She continued to perform and record extensively, working with the leading musicians of the day, through to 1976, playing a large role in the revival of rebetiko in the 1970s. She died of throat cancer in 1997, still admired by critics, other musicians and the public.
Bellou was generous with her music, and uncompromising in her life: she worked with the resistance during the Nazi occupation and then with the leftists in the civil war that followed, and was jailed by both Nazis and the right-wing Greek government. She was beaten by right-wing thugs for refusing to sing a song they requested in the late 1940s and quit Tsitsanis’s club when none of the musicians there stood up for her. She lived openly as a lesbian in a less-than-gay-friendly country. She is widely acknowledged as the finest of the female rebetiko singers. We Broke Up One Evening, written by Vasilis Tsitsanis, was recorded in 1949.
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