ABSTRACT
It was well past midnight on a Saturday in late November 2004 when I reached a dark side street in Psirri, a nightlife district in downtown Athens with a plethora of relatively inexpensive bars and restaurants attracting mainly students. On my way to a small taverna named Protogenes’, an amusing thought floated into my mind: the songs I expected to enjoy there tonight were as much part of this labyrinth of streets as the funky nightspots, the old two-storey houses with crumbling plaster and the shabby post-war apartment blocks around me. For in the second half of the nineteenth century, Psirri had been a ‘stronghold of idlers and thugs’, to quote from an encyclopaedia entry on the Athens underworld (originally published in 1933, reprinted in Petropoulos 1980, 14-22). And it is above all the lyrics of early rebetiko songs that preserve a memory of the habits and lifestyle of such individuals. I felt that in my pursuit of knowledge about how these songs are performed today I had now intruded into their territory. Here they were more than just a faint echo of the past – here it was me who became a faint echo of the present.
