Prodromos Tsaousakis & Vassilis Tsitsanis

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Prodromos Tsaousakis & Vassilis Tsitsanis · Vassilis Tsitsanis was born in 1915 in Trikala, in Greece. He was a songwriter and bouzouki player, and is regarded as one of the founders of modern rebetiko and laiko. His family came from Epirus. As a boy he learned violin, mandola and mandolin, instruments that kept recurring in many of his songs. In 1936 he went to Athens to study law, and a year later he had also learned to play the bouzouki and made his first recording. In 1938 he moved to Thessaloniki, where he stayed for about ten years, including during the German occupation. There he became famous, opened an ouzeri and wrote many of his best songs. When the Germans closed the record companies in 1941, he had already recorded about a hundred songs of his own.

Music and breakthrough

In 1946 he returned to Athens and recorded many of his own compositions. In doing so he made singers famous, among them Sotiria Bellou, Marika Ninou, Ioanna Georgakopoulou and Prodromos Tsaousakis. Tsitsanis made rebetiko more Western and brought it to large parts of the population. In this way he laid the foundation for the later laiko. Synnefiasmeni Kyriaki, which School of Rock mentions, dates from 1948 and belongs to that period, in which Tsaousakis was one of the singers.

Influence

Tsitsanis wrote more than five hundred songs. He died in 1984 in London, on his sixty-ninth birthday, after a lung operation. All of Greece mourned, and he is still regarded as a legend of rebetiko. The local source file says nothing further about Tsaousakis himself, so this text follows mainly Tsitsanis.

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