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<\/a><\/p>\nTradition lies heavy on my people, yet it makes us who we are \u2013 for good and ill. One of its greatest champions just left us: Dh\u00f3mna Sam\u00edou, a tireless collector and preserver of folksongs who began to sing them herself in her forties, in a distinctive voice that thrummed like the finest Damascus steel.<\/p>\n
Sam\u00edou\u2019s parents were working-class refugees from Asia Minor; her father had been a prisoner of war in Turkey after the disastrous war in 1922. Her childhood was spent in abject poverty, in a shack without water or electricity, but also in the strong social net of mutual support that sprang up in such circumstances. Her father and sister died during the German occupation. She might have starved or been killed herself \u2013 the shacks were in a neighborhood of Athens famous for its urban resistance, which the Germans punished accordingly. She escaped the roundups because she had started working at twelve, first as a seamstress in a small tailoring establishment, then as a live-in maid in a middle-class home.<\/p>\n
The family she worked for heard her sing constantly while she worked, so they brought her to S\u00edmon Kar\u00e1s, a famous music teacher and pioneering collector of traditional music. He accepted Sam\u00edou into his choir on the spot, stipulating that she should finish high school (a rare feat in that context, particularly for girls). Work in the mornings, music lessons in the afternoons, school in the evenings: that was Sam\u00edou\u2019s life for several years. In 1954 she started working in broadcasting under her teacher. National radio (all radio was national then in Hell\u00e1s) started airing traditional music, as well as making and selling records of it.<\/p>\n
As Hell\u00e1s tried to show it belonged to the First World, traditional music tottered under the onslaught of Western popular music. Sam\u00edou, like Kar\u00e1s, could not imagine her people\u2019s culture without it. During her vacations she started going around the country, on her own dime, to identify and record the fast-disappearing authentic versions of folksongs. When she started becoming too independent, Kar\u00e1s slowly removed her from his orbit: despite his initial generosity and crucial formative role in her life, he would not brook a competitor or even a successor \u2013 especially a woman.<\/p>\n
When the junta came, Sam\u00edou was given tenure at her job but couldn\u2019t stomach the repression. She resigned at 43 with no safety net. At that crucial moment, Dionyssis Savv\u00f3poulos \u2013 the iconoclastic, obscenely talented enfant terrible<\/em> of Hellenic music \u2013 invited her to appear in his politically and artistically daring events. That launched her career as a singer of the songs she had so lovingly found and fought to save. After the junta fell, national television commissioned Sam\u00edou to do Musical Travel<\/em>, a documentary series about traditional music that is considered a classic, the foundation for all subsequent such works. Below is a part celebrating \u00c9piros, my mother\u2019s part of the world.<\/p>\n