Mally (for Mazeltov) Matsa was Jewish teenager from Ioannina when she arrived in New York in 1912, reportedly for an arranged marriage.
After working a variety of jobs, and getting divorced, she turned to singing for a living in New York clubs, and recorded a series of Turkish language recordings credited to “Amalia.”
In the early 1920s, she married Gus Bakas and entered her most productive and influential period. Between 1926 and 1929, she recorded 28 sides, most of them now classic Smyrneika-style rebetiko, under the name Amalia Baka. In the 1930s, she toured with other Greek-American performers, and in the 1940s opened her own club in Chicago and resumed recording, sometimes credited as Amalia Matsa.
She finally retired in 1960 and moved to Florida to be near her daughter, Diamonda, with whom she had often performed.
You Told Me to be a Manga is based on the melody of The Hash Smokers, recorded by many, including Evangelos Sofroniou in 1928, but with different lyrics. It was recorded in 1948.
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