Nikos Xylouris

Xylouris was born on 7 July 1936 in Anogeia, a shepherds' village high on the slopes of Mount Psiloritis in the Rethymno region of Crete; in August 1944 the Germans burned it to the ground in reprisal for the kidnapping of General Kreipe. His family were nicknamed «Ψαροί» (the grey ones), which is why he and his brothers are known as Psaronikos, Psarantonis and Psarogiannis. He took up the three-stringed Cretan lyra as a boy, began playing at weddings and feasts, and made his first recordings in Heraklion in the late 1950s.

In 1967 he opened a music club called Ερωτόκριτος in Heraklion, and his reputation spread beyond the island. The turning point came in 1969, when the composer Yannis Markopoulos, also a Cretan, asked him to sing Ανυφαντού (The Weaver Girl); the record made his voice known in Athens, and he moved there. Through the 1970s he sang for Markopoulos, Stavros Xarchakos, Christos Leontis and others, filling the Athens clubs night after night while the colonels' junta ruled.

In November 1973 he went inside the occupied Polytechnic and sang with the students behind the gates; the photographs were on the front pages, and the regime banned his concerts and closed the club where he appeared. After the fall of the junta he was at the height of his fame when he fell ill with cancer. He died in Piraeus on 8 February 1980, aged 43; the actress Jenny Karezi had called him «the Archangel», and «ο Αρχάγγελος της Κρήτης» is how Greeks still speak of him.

Xylouris sang two kinds of music and joined them. The first was the tradition of Crete: the ριζίτικα, slow, unaccompanied songs of the mountain villages «at the roots» of the White Mountains, and the μαντινάδες, rhymed couplets improvised to the lyra. Markopoulos's album Ριζίτικα (1971) put these old songs on record in his voice, among them Πότε θα κάνει ξαστεριά (When Will the Sky Be Clear), a song of revolt against the Turks that became, in his mouth, a song against the dictatorship. The other song he sang at the Polytechnic, Μπήκαν στην πόλη οι οχτροί (The Enemies Have Entered the City), is a Markopoulos song from the same years.

The second kind was the new «art-popular» song of the 1970s, where composers set poetry to music for voices like his. For Markopoulos he recorded Χρονικό (Chronicle, 1970), Ιθαγένεια (Nationality, 1972) and songs such as Χίλια μύρια κύματα (A Thousand Thousand Waves, c. 1974), a sailor's song that is now sung at the end of parties when the night turns sad. For Christos Leontis he sang the Ritsos cycle Καπνισμένο τσουκάλι (Smoke-blackened Pot, 1975), and in 1976 he recorded, with Tania Tsanaklidou, long passages of the Cretan Renaissance romance Ερωτόκριτος in Christodoulos Chalaris's setting, which is how many Greeks first heard the poem. His voice was high, pure and slightly nasal in the Cretan manner, with a long, unhurried line and almost no ornament; he sang as if telling the truth, and that is why political songs sounded sincere in his mouth.

Listen first to Πότε θα κάνει ξαστεριά, which is still sung at demonstrations and every year on 17 November, the anniversary of the Polytechnic uprising; then to Ανυφαντού, Χίλια μύρια κύματα and his Ερωτόκριτος. In Anogeia, which lives from sheep, weaving and music, his house, marked with a plaque, is a place people visit, and his brother Psarantonis, his nephew Giorgis Xylouris (Psarogiorgis) and a younger generation of Xylourides carry the tradition on; the surname alone means Cretan music in Greece. Streets in Crete carry his name, and his records are reissued constantly. For a learner, the rizitika are a gentle way into Cretan dialect, because the lines are short and repeated.

• His nickname Ψαρονίκος has nothing to do with fish (ψάρι): the family were called «Ψαροί», the grey-haired ones.
• Anogeia, his village, was burned by the German army in August 1944; the music tradition he grew up in survived in a rebuilt village.
• He sang inside the occupied Athens Polytechnic in November 1973, days before tanks broke the gates.
• The lyra he played has three strings and is held upright on the knee, bowed like a tiny cello.