Mother I can’t seems to be one of the first two rebetiko songs recorded in Athens (the other is The Couplets of the Manga, on the other side of the 78 RPM disc).
Yiannis Spachanis was the singer and Thanasis Manetas played bouzouki; there is also a cimbalom on the recording. Not much information about the performers is easily available. We know that Manetas was born in the 1880s in Greece. Markos Vamvakaris lists Manetas among the good bouzouki players that he heard in Piraeus tekes during his early years there. So when Manetas went into the recording studio, he was an already established performer and (likely) experienced rebetiko player.
The lyrics are different, but Mother I can’t is melodically similar to the song Under the tomatoes, a bouzouki piece recorded in New York in 1928 by Yiannakis Ioannidis and Manolis Karapiperis. Mother I can’t had a bit of life: it was recorded by Vamvakaris, Kaiti Grey and then by a number of groups during the rebetiko revival of the 1980s.
While Batis and Vamvakaris commonly get credit for earliest recordings of Piraeus rebetiko music, the disk with Mother I can’t preceded those recordings by two years. It’s possible that the Spachanis and Manetas rebetiko tunes didn’t catch on when record was released. Two months later, To minore tou teke, the hugely popular bouzouki masterpiece, was recorded in New York and released in Athens, setting off a rush to record bouzouki music, so they may have just been rebetes before their time.
(There’s a Smyrneika song recorded a little earlier than Mother I can’t in 1931: A Smyrnian in Kokkinia, by Antonis Dalgas, written by Giorgos Asikis – the tune bears more than a passing resemblance to an Asia Minor folk piece called Konyalim. If you agree that Smyrneika and bouzouki-based music are two streams that make up the river called rebetiko, that would seem to make A Smyrnian in Kokkinia the first rebetiko song recorded in Athens.)
The debate over the first recording is a sometimes lively one, but thanks to the record and song collectors, this marvellous rebetiko song is available to us, a great example of what rebetiko sounded like in those early days.
Leave a Reply