Yannis Papaioannou

Papaioannou was born in 1913 in Kios (Κίος, today Gemlik in Turkey), an old Greek town on the southern shore of the Sea of Marmara. In 1922, when the Greek army collapsed in Asia Minor, the Greek population of Kios had to leave, and the nine-year-old boy came to Greece with his family among more than a million refugees. Like most of them, they arrived with almost nothing and started again in the poor districts of the capital, settling in Tzitzifies, by the sea between Athens and Piraeus.

The refugee neighbourhoods of Athens and Piraeus were where rebetiko took shape in the 1920s and 1930s, a meeting of the café music of Smyrna and Constantinople with the songs of the Piraeus underworld. Papaioannou grew up in that world. He learned the bouzouki as a young man, played in the taverns and, from the late 1930s, began to record. He had to work under the censorship of the Metaxas dictatorship (1936–1941), which banned songs about hashish and the underworld, and like his colleagues he turned to love songs and scenes of city life.

His most productive years were the 1940s and 1950s, after the Occupation, when rebetiko became the popular song of the whole country and the great singers of the day recorded his music. He continued to compose and perform until 1972, when he was killed in a road accident on his way home from work at dawn.

Papaioannou belongs to the generation that carried rebetiko from the hashish dens of the 1930s to the mass audience of the post-war years. As a bouzouki player he was admired for his clean, expressive style in the classic three-course tradition; as a composer he wrote a large body of songs in the main rebetiko dance rhythms, the ζεϊμπέκικο (zeibekiko), the χασάπικο (hasapiko) and the τσιφτετέλι (tsifteteli).

His themes are those of the city poor: love and jealousy, the night and the tavern, the dignity of the μάγκας, the street-wise man of the neighbourhood, and, beneath it all, the memory of uprooting. Πριν το χάραμα (Before Dawn) is the song most people know, its very title calling up the last hours of a night in the tavern, when the music goes on until daybreak. Πέντε Έλληνες στον Άδη (Five Greeks in Hades) was another great hit, and Μοδιστρούλα (The Little Seamstress), Καπετάν Αντρέας Ζέππος (Captain Andreas Zeppos) and Φοβάμαι μη σε χάσω (I'm Afraid of Losing You) are classics of the genre. In the instrumental Σούρουπο στις Τζιτζιφιές (Dusk in Tzitzifies) you can hear his own playing.

Many of his songs are sung today without people knowing who wrote them, which is the fate of much rebetiko. For specialists, though, Papaioannou stands with Vamvakaris and Tsitsanis as one of the composers who gave the genre its classic form.

To meet Papaioannou, listen to a recording of Πριν το χάραμα and then go to a ρεμπετάδικο, a tavern with live rebetiko, where his songs are part of the standard repertoire; musicians there will know them even if the audience does not know the composer's name. His songs appear on most anthologies of classic rebetiko, and they were rediscovered by a younger generation during the rebetiko revival of the 1970s and 1980s. In Nea Kios, near Argos, the memory of old Kios is still kept alive. His life is also a good way into the story of the 1922 refugees, which shaped modern Greek music.

• He was born in Kios, today Gemlik in Turkey, and arrived in Greece as a refugee at the age of nine.
• A whole town in the Peloponnese, Nea Kios near Argos, was founded by refugees from his birthplace.
• Like other rebetes, he had to adapt his songs to the censorship of the Metaxas dictatorship, which banned songs about hashish.
• Many Greeks can sing his songs without knowing his name.