Chronology of an infatuation

I can't reconstruct my earliest steps in appreciation of Greek music, though I think they probably had their origin in Greek language radio programming in Boston in the early 1950s (the origin of my infatuation with Armenian music, certainly). In high school years one of my teachers had been at Athens College before coming to California, and I dimly remember that he had some Greek records. I think the first I bought myself was Songs and Dances of Greece, a 10-inch Folkways disk released in 1953 (and thus representing postwar material, though it's not clear where Folkways got the various cuts). And I pretty much played the grooves off of the original copy, and bought another in the days when one could still buy Folkways vinyl. In retrospect, some of the cuts on that record are folkloric chestnuts, prettified versions of what may once have been 'authentic' folk material. (Gerakina is such a one), but some have stuck with me through all the subsequent Greek material I've heard.
One of those is O Mitros ki Marina, a tune with an indefinable something that made it one of the first I tried to play myself. That something is probably the minor second in the B part here and here, and the rhythmic tastiness of this bit.
Another record that I happened upon sometime and somewhere is Greek Island and Mountain Songs, done by the Royal Greek Festival Company (which first toured the US in 1954, and is associated with folklorist Dora Stratou). The songs I Trata and Tris Aderfes impressed me immediately and have stuck with me ever since. The record has a folkloric cast, perhaps sanitizing and digesting the material to make it appealing to non-specialist and non-native audiences, but its quick tour of regions and styles made a good foundation for my later discovery of field recordings and commercial releases: the Pontos medley and Epirus medley are examples that certainly prepared my young ears for the challenging sounds of the Pontic lyra and Epirote clarino.

In the early 1960s, one of the participants in the Folk Revival in Harvard Square was Harvard librarian (and Milwaukee native, and conservatory-trained) Ted Alevizos. He's one of the Folksingers 'Round Harvard Square on the first record Joan Baez made [1959]. His two records (Songs of Greece [1960] and Greek Folksongs Sung by Ted Alevizos [1961], both with backup guitar by Rolf Cahn) got a lot of play on my turntable in 1961-1963, though now their songs-from-archives ambience seems so folkie-smooth as to make me question their authenticity as Greek music. A reviewer concurs:

The Greeks have been too close too long to the frenetic and violent Dry World for their songs to be called beautiful. These songs do not have the quality of songs one hears in Greece: as a specific example, Alevizos does not have the throat for glottal trilling that is characteristic of singing from the Fertile Crescent to Turkestan. For our ears, this is all to the good, for this record gives us a beautiful voice singing beautiful songs.
(John Greenway, Western Folklore, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Apr., 1962), pp. 147-150)
Still, Alevizos' archival research in the bowels of Widener Library uncovered materials collected in Smyrna in the 1870s (by Bougault-Ducoudray) and lots of regional material that has been forgotten in Greece. He pretty much stays with the Western European tempered scales, and doesn't have an Anatolian sound with the Smyrnaic material (compare his Agapisa Melachrino with a version recorded in Smyrna in 1915; and his Astrapen i Anatoli with a more Smyrnaic version; and ditto the Alevizos Anathema with a more Smyrnaic version; and while we're at it, the Alevizos Ma ti thelei with the more Smyrnaic...) , but I'm glad to rediscover his recordings and experience again the sense of connection with this version of 'Greek' music that I enjoyed 45 years ago.

Another significant record in the evolution of my appreciation for Greek music was Greece in Music and Song, which I happened upon in Singapore in 1966. This one is a product of a field trip to non-tourist corners of Greece by a Nagra-toting BBC team, and it contributed several to my Eternal Faves category: Aiutos, Tsamikos, and the super-creepy Miralogia

Where are you going, my silver one
Where are you going, my fresh sprig of basil
To lose your bloom?
You are not meant to descend into the black earth
You will repent my boy, a thousand times an hour
for the decision you made to die
There where you have gone
they call it the land of no return
Where two together do not sit
and three do not talk
and no marriages are made
and no festivities held
and there are no fields where you can play with your horse

("Three widows in black, crouching at dusk by kerosene lamplight, intoned this dirge in praise of a young man. Laments like this are heard only in Epirus, Mani, and parts of Crete. Village superstition decrees that if keening occurs and there is no death, ill-luck will befall the inhabitants. The recording was made secretly with the help of the mayor [who was not superstitious; on his advice we left the village immediately afterwards.]")

It was sometime in the early 1980s that I really caught the bug and started accumulating a lot of Greek music: Arhoolie/Folkways issued Greek-Oriental Songs and Dances, drawing on the collections of Prof. Martin Schwartz and providing plentiful background information on the music, and I was transfixed. About the same time I ordered the six records of Rebetiki Istoria, and Gail Holst's Road to Rembetika: music of a Greek sub-culture songs of love, sorrow a & hashish [1975] which provided background and translations that made Rembetika more accessible. I also noticed (in visits to Cambridge) the Ford Foundation-funded regional series (Songs of... by the many regions into which Greece is divided), and bought a lot of those too.

Down Home Music in El Cerrito has been a frequent source of Greek material, and visits have generally yielded CDs produced in Greece. In recent years I've bought quite a few by mail order as well. For example, I discovered Ross Daly at Down Home Music in El Cerrito (probably sometime in the 1980s), and I've been merrily accumulating his many recordings ever since. I'm pretty sure that it was the pictures of exotic instruments on the record jacket that first got me hooked, but the music itself is unfailingly magnificent. Side A of the first (vinyl) album offers two dynamite pieces that demonstrate his genius: Lauto (played on lauto, but with an approach that isn't restricted to the traditional styles) and Autoschediasmos (played on sarangi, not exactly a Greek instrument, and not exactly Greek music either, but who cares...). This is the music I'd play myself, if I could.

My collecting hasn't been systematic, and occasionally I've been fooled by clever packaging.