You just don’t get more “roots” that today’s toker tune. We are traveling back 80 years and visiting the country of Greece for today’s toker-friendly tune. This wonderful world music is from the genre of Rebetika, which is Greek folk music that took a similar path to that of American folk music. Rebetika was originally written in the early 20th century and then revitalized in the 1960′s and 1970′s. The track is from an amazingly cool album called “Cannabis Indica in Rebetika Songs, Recordings from 1931 – 1946″. Like other folk music genres, Rebetika often covered topics that were important to the working class who wrote and preformed the music among groups of friends and peers. This collection includes 18 songs from that long-ago era with titles like, “Smoking the Hubble Bubble for Hours”, “When I’m smoking a Joint”, “The Nargile” (which is a word for a Turkish Hookah), “We Were Smoking One Night” and today’s tune, “Tis Mastouras O Skopos” which is Greek for “The Point of Getting High”. Now I must admit, I can’t tell you exactly what the lyrics mean. It is literally Greek to me, but as a folk music fan I enjoyed listening to this piece of history, and just knowing it is from some of our not so far-off ancestors who also enjoyed relaxing after a day’s work with cannabis makes it all the more compelling.
Stratos Payoumtzis, Stelios Keromytis
“The Point of Getting High” (mp3)
from “Cannabis Indica in Rebetika Songs Recordings 1931-1946″
(HELLENICRECORD)
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These specific songs are a subgenre of rebetika, called “apagorevmena” (the forbidden ones), and there are a hundreds more sang in humble places around Greece, not where guides take tourists though, i’m afraid
Most of them have lyrics about weed, and other intoxicants, like heroin, opium or coke, bu often refer to them as remedy for love ..nice?
Awesome find! I’m a second-generation Greek-American (my grandparents came from Greece in the 1950s) and grew up around rebetiko, epirotiko (a more middle-eastern style from northern Greece, where my family is from, that heavily uses a clarinet and a slow drum beat, similar to ‘snake-charming music’), and other Greek styles (including, of course, Yanni. One of my grandmother’s sisters has a HUGE crush on him).
I’ll be on the lookout for this album