ABSTRACT
The singing poet model in Greece first takes the form of the popular songwriter as auteur, exemplified in the case of the composers Manos Hadjidakis and Mikis Theodorakis both of whom achieved a national standing equivalent to that of Leo Ferre and Georges Brassens in France. The two composers set well-known poems from the Greek canon to music and collaborated extensively with poets who wrote lyrics for their songs. Tellingly, rebetiko starts to be considered as one genre at the moment when urban popular music, whose development was based on paid entertainment and recorded music, decisively supersedes older folk traditions in the national imaginary. An important difference is that the Greek intellectual intervention in popular music does not seem to originate from a politically motivated definition of the people and the popular as is the case with the French poesie populaire.
