THE GREEK LYRICIST AND COMPOSER AKIS PANOU

This book is about the understudied Greek songwriter Akis Panou (1933–2000), one of the most significant musicians in the history of laiko song,1 that is, a particular genre of popular music that flour-ished in the urban scene of Greece in the twentieth century. Our goal is to introduce the artist’s work to audiences beyond his homeland. While there is a certain amount of printed material re-garding other significant composers of the genre, such as Markos Vamvakaris and Vassilis Tsitsanis, and a large number of publica-tions on Greek popular song up to the mid-1960s, there is marked-ly little literature on the subsequent era—the era during which Akis Panou produced the bulk of his work. Moreover, the extant sources on the artist himself are extremely few. The material that exists comes almost exclusively from online rather than printed sources and is fragmentary in nature. Our hope is that this book will serve as a small step towards ameliorating this state of affairs.
No one of us, the authors, is a professional musicologist or eth-nomusicologist. However, we have been immersed in the artist’s work as listeners and one of us as an amateur bouzouki2 player, (bouzouki being the principal instrument used in laiko song), who loves to play and interpret, among other songs, Akis Panou’s com-positions. This is how we developed a profound appreciation of and admiration for Akis Panou, as both a lyricist and a musical composer, and so we are not writing this book as ‘objective’ Car-tesian observers or as detached academics. It is our sincere passion for the artist’s work that ultimately brought the present volume into being.