Marika Papagika was a popular Greek singer in the early 20th century and one of the first Greek women singers to be heard on sound recordings.
11 Facts About Marika Papagika
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Marika Papagika was born on the island of Kos on September 1,1890.
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Marika Papagika emigrated to America through Ellis Island in 1915 with her husband, Kostas Papagika, a cymbalom player who was her accompanist.
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Marika Papagika was thus among the first to record Greek music in the USA.
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Marika Papagika's attracted not only Greeks as regular patrons, but Albanians, Arabs, Armenians, Bulgarians and Turks.
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Marika Papagika's cafe-aman was a successful business until the stock market crashed.
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The club closed in 1930, and Marika Papagika's recording career ended, except for four sides recorded for Victor in 1937.
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Marika Papagika distinguished herself from most of her contemporaries by virtue of her sweet soprano voice with its relatively high tessitura, her vocal timbre, somewhat reminiscent of Western classical singers, and her diction.
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Marika Papagika was accompanied on all but about 50 of her recordings by her husband Gus and by cellist Markos Sifnios, one of very few cellists in Greek folk music recordings.
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Since the early 1990s, Marika Papagika's songs have featured regularly in American, French, and Greek-produced CD reissues focusing on the musical genre often called "rebetiko", including the first reissue solely dedicated to her, a 19-track compilation released in 1994 by Alma Criolla Records, USA.
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The first Greek reissue entirely dedicated to Marika Papagika appeared in 1999, and this was expanded to a 3-CD set in 2008, presenting a grand total of 52 songs.