Voula Gika made her first recording in 1950 and her last in 2013. In between, she sang on hundreds of records. (One online site even makes the unlikely claim of 5,000 recordings.)
The reason she is not better known is that but for a handful of exceptions, she sang second or even third voice. That even earned her the nickname queen of the seconds.
Gika’s first recording, The cord, was with Markos Vamvakaris and Soula Kalfopoulou, and she went on to sing with all of the leading recording artists of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s.
She was born in 1933 and her family moved to Piraeus shortly before WWII broke out in 1940. Gika began singing on stage in the post-war years as a teenager, and recorded The cord when she was only 17.
Her work as a supporting singer continued through much of the first stage of her career. While she recorded a few songs as the first singer, it was only in 1969 that a solo performance became a hit. In the early 1970s, she met folk composer Nikos Karanikola, who became her husband, and for the next two decades, they appeared in nightclubs throughout Greece, Europe and America.
In the 1980s, she recorded three albums of rebetiko music and she continued to appear alongside a new generation of laiko musicians, as well as a solo performer of Greek music TV. She died at age 91 in 2024.
I’ve become a bad mother was one of her relatively rare solo recordings, made in 1954, with Mary Asteris and Panos Gavalas providing supporting voices.
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