Marika Papagika

Marika Papagika (Μαρ?κα Παπαγκ?κα) (1890–1943) was a Greek singer of laika and rembetika, and one of the first Greek women singers to be heard on sound recordings.

She was born on the island of Kos on 1st September 1890, and toured the cafe circuit in the late Ottoman period, including the cities of Athens, Smyrna, Constantinople, Cairo, and Alexandria. In late 1913 or early 1914, she recorded for the Gramophone Company (later Victor Records), although none of those recordings have so far been found.

Apparently at the urging of the Victor recordings company, she had relocated to New York City by 1918, when she recorded a session for them. Early in 1919, she also began recording for Columbia Records. Over the next ten years, she recorded about two hundred performances of cafe aman-type songs, including kleftiko, demotika, rebetiko and light classical pieces, many of them overlapping with with her chief rival in Greek music sales in the U.S. Koula Antonopoulos (known on her recordings as Mme. Coula). By the mid-1920s she and her husband Kostas (“Gus”), a cymbalum player, had their own club in New York on 34th St between 7th and 8th Avenues, where Marika was often accompanied by Gus cellist Markos Sifnios, the violinist Athanasios Makedounas and the Epirot violinist Alexis Zoumbas. Marika was a noted exponent of the Smyrnaic style of the rebetiko tragoudi.

She and her husband apparently lost the nightspot shortly after the great financial crisis of 1929, and her recording career ended in that year as well, except for four sides recorded in 1937. Marika died in New York on 2nd August 1943.


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