#about half of those early immigrants arrived between 1900-1910

[inkykeiji]

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[canaryrecords]

Sotirios Stasinopoulos was one of the most gifted folk singers to have recorded in the first half of the 20th century and one of the most vibrant Greek singers to ever have recorded. Born in the small mountain village of Dafni in the district of Achea in the northern Peleponessus where the largest close town was Kalavryta (present-day population only about 2,000) on March 1, 1878, he followed his brother Vasillios (William) to the U.S. for the first time at the age of 27 on May 10, 1902 at Ellis Island with $12 ($350 in today’s money) in his pocket.

About half of the 500,000 Greek men who arrived in the United States between 1890 and 1920 came to earn money and then returned home. Stasinopoulos went back to Greece twice but then came back to the U.S. first in April 1905 when he said that he was a shoemaker and intended to go live with his brother-in-law Constantinos Kamakiotis in Orange, New Jersey where he subsequently worked as a barber and then again in 1912, when he arrived one last time. His 1912 immigration document, issued when he was 34, mentions a scar across his face. We don't know whether he was involved, but his later songs show strong political leaning that could have tied him to the onset of the Balkan Wars of 1912-13

Six years later in 1918, he was living at the southern tip of Manhattan at 20 Greenwich St, a section then overrun by Irish street gangs including the Hudson Dusters and only a block or so away from the stretch of Washington Street known as Little Syria, crowded with Arabic-speakers. He identified himself as a professional musician but was working for one George Calogeras, an importer about five years his senior who had spent four months in jail for tax evasion on the importation of figs.

Stasinopoulos recorded a trial disc for Victor Records accompanied by a house pianist on April 19, 1921 at the age of 42. Having passed the audition, he recorded four songs at a session in September 1921. One of the four, “Drousoula,” gave him trouble after three takes, and he returned on March 13, 1922, when, after five more takes, he finally cut a master. Within a few months, he had two discs on the market, and in October and November of that year, he recorded eight more songs for Victor.

He recorded for Columbia for the first time in 1923, cutting four sides, all of them issued and setting a pattern for the rest of the decade. Every few months from September 1924 until January 1929, he went into the studio and cut between four and eight sides for Victor, Columbia, or Okeh Records. Practically everything he recorded from that point on was done in one or two takes and was issued. He had learned a lesson from the 1922 sessions, arrived at the studio prepared and got the job done.

In total, he recorded 94 performances, all but the first four of them issued on relatively expensive 12” discs. We present here 16 of the 38 performances he made between September 1921 and April 1925 in the order in which they were recorded. All of this material was recorded acoustically, which is to say before the advent of microphones. Although about half of the performances have circulated online for a few years, a half-dozen of them are available elsewhere too fast. (Victor discs before 1922 run significantly slower than 78rpm; playback at 78rpm is roughly two whole-tones higher than the pitch at which they were recorded.)

His accompanists were largely established semi-professional players about a decade younger than Stasinopoulos himself, mostly from the Peleponesian peninsula and all from smaller municipalities including Sparta, Kalamata, and Corinth - never from the cosmopolitan port cities. Several of them cut discs under their own names, although only he obscure clarinetist Tom Vrounas cut any discs at Stasinopoulos’ sessions. (Vrounas’ 1926 performances appear to the only instances of Stasinopoulos as an accompanist, playing lauto.) Many of Stasinopoulos’ accompanists also recorded with other significant Greek vocalists of the 1910s-20s including Madame Coula and Marika Papagika.

The most consistent accompanist among Stasinopoulos' 1922-25 performances was the santouri (hammer dulcimer) player Louis P. Rassias, who was born in Sparta May 2, 1884 and lived in Montreal for a short while before crossing to the U.S. by ferry to Detroit, where a warrant was issued and then rescinded for his arrest, then moved to Lowell, Massachusetts and finally New York City. When he declared his Intent to Naturalize as an American citizen in 1932, he was living at 404 W 35th St. a few blocks from the center of the Greek nightclub scene. He cut 13 sides for Okeh and Columbia on his own between 1929-29. After the Depression, he moved first to 860 N. 9th Ave and then where he worked repairing shoes and then uptown to 525 W 138 St.

Like many performers, the reorganization of the major record companies after 1929 pretty well ended Stasinopoulos' recording career. It’s clear that he continued to perform, although the only documentation we have of any of Stasinopoulos’ live performances is of a gig at the Windsor Hotel in Montreal under the auspices of the Laconic Brotherhood, a Hellenic organization founded in 1936 and still operating today.

In the early- or mid-40s, he self-released a handful of performances on his own label with a photo of himself in full Grecian folk dress, a hand on his hip and a great mustache. He was at that point well into his 60s. The material he recorded then demonstrated a profound Hellenic nationalism unsurprising as an ex-patriot witness to the Balkan Wars and two World Wars on his country.

His last address was at 1977 E 16th St in New York, less than 20 blocks from French Hospital where he died on on July 22, 1948.

There is something deeply solitary and wonderful in Stasinopoulos’ voice. His subject matter is relentlessly tied to his origin in the rural mountains in a country that had only won independence less than 50 years before he was born in a struggle that originated out of his home district. He speaks for the hillbillies who fought and died and won Greece. He is proud, inflexilble, and a great stylist with a masculine presence and a voice that emanates liquid sequences through these poems of rural life. He seems to embody something that is profoundly old - a spirit of Greekness that might well have existed a millennium ago. Somewhere in the mists of time at some table over emptied bottles of fantastic, hard vinegar, there was a Sotirios Stasinopoulos of some kind rhapsodizing and singing some old poem about a mountain or a hero or a tree or a mother or all four at once.

Known accompanists: Louis Rassias (santouri, b. Sparta, May 2, 1884; arrived in the U.S. 1900) tracks 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, Nicolas Relias (clarinet, b. Corinth ca. 1888; arrived in the U.S. 1907) tracks 6, 7, 13, 14, 15, 16 John Kiriakatis (clarinet, b. Thebes, April 15, 1885; arrived in the U.S. 1911) track 5 Stasinopoulos is the lauto player where it appears.

Tracks 1-3 Sept. 7, 1921 Track 4 Sept. 22, 1921 Tracks 5-7 Oct. 5, 1922 Tracks 8 1923 Tracks 9-10 Oct. 26, 1923 Tracks 11-12 Sept. 24, 1924 Tracks 13-16 April,1925

Where English translations of song titles were given on the original disc labels, we have retained those.

Transfers, restoration, and notes by Ian Nagoski, March 2020 Discographical data from Richard K. Spottswood, Ethnic Music on Records: A Discography of Ethnic Recordings Produced in the United States, 1893 - 1942 (University of Illinois Press), 1990

Examples of later Stasinopoulos performances can be heard on the Canary Releases To What Strange Place ("O Korakas," 1927) and Why I Came to America ("Metaxas," ca. 1940s).

[cityutopiadystopia]

Socialist Publications in Chicago (1900-1908)

Chicago was one of the first centers of Socialism in the U.S. This was in part due to the large groups of working class immigrant people who were arriving in Chicago between the 19th and early 20thCenturies. There were Socialist Conventions that took place in the city in 1898, 1904, 1908, 1910, alongside the founding of the Socialist Party in 1901. These undercurrents in Chicago can be clearly discerned in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle; the book reaches its narrative climax when Jurgis encounters Socialist Media and a Socialist Gathering, and is thereby uplifted. We decided to map out where Socialist media, particularly newspapers, were being produced between 1900 and 1908, the same time period during which Sinclair was writing the Jungle.

Each red square on the map represents a different Socialist newspaper. The relative sizes of each circle denote the publications’ comparative circulation between the years of 1900 and 1908—small circles indicating narrow dissemination and readership, and large circles indicating wide. We tracked nine publications, one on the North Side, two in the loop, two in the South Side, and four in the West Side. These publications span six languages; Armenian, Slovak, Italian, Swedish, Croatian, and English. The two English language publications were located in the Loop and in Hyde Park, and enjoyed the largest distribution. These could have been for Irish and British immigrants as well as for more educated audiences, such as the ones Jurgis encounters at the Socialist lecture. In Pilsen, we see four different languages, with Armenian, Slovak, Italian, and Croatian, which were all being printed within a few square blocks of each other. This was possible because of its accessibility to the Back of the Yards, as well to as the other immigrant communities in Pilsen and West Chicago. Finally, we see a Swedish newspaper on the North Side, near the traditionally Swedish neighborhood of Andersonville.

By the beginning of the 20th century, Chicago was home to a whole host of Socialist publications. The languages of these publications varied wildly, ranging from English to Eastern European ones such as Croatian and Slovak. Socialist papers were issued in such a vast number of languages in response to a thirst in contemporary immigrant communities to learn about Socialist philosophies. In essence, each paper targeted a different immigrant group. The largest paper, International Socialist Review, was published in English and had a circulation size of around 40,000 people. By contrast, one of the smaller papers of the time, Radnicka Straza, was published in Croatian and had a circulation size of approximately 2700. Thus, it’s apparent that while the English language publications may have had the widest sphere of influence, the smaller, more community-specific papers had a relatively large following given the number of immigrants comprising said communities. While these papers might have all differed in language and expected consumer base, they were united in their ideology, and therefore allowed Socialism to become a unifying force via its relevancy to a large swath of factory laborers in Chicago. This multilingual in Socialist publications continued into the 1920s, at which time less than half of all labor papers were for an English-speaking audience.

           Additionally, some of the Socialist publications were aimed at even more niche groups. For instance, what became known as Progressive Woman “published letters from women throughout the Midwest, which offer insight into the thoughts of Socialists and the appeal of the movement for rural and urban women.”

Immigration was a social driver for Chicago’s growth. The city’s rapid expansion—beginning in the middle of the 19th century and extending into the 20th—can be attributed in large part to massive influx of immigrants that converged upon the city during the same period. So, for much of its history, Chicago was more of an immigrant city than anything else. The first to come were the Germans—by the 1850’s, they constituted about one-sixth of Chicago’s swelling populous. This would continue to be the case until early in the 20th century. Germans began arriving in the city at a time prior to its industrial transformation; thus, those who ended up settling in Chicago were not seeking unskilled factory jobs, as was the case with the European groups that constituted latter-day immigration waves. Rather, the first Germans to come to Chicago were craftsmen; they were skilled laborers. Still, these first immigrants experienced much of the same discriminations that would plague their successors. Given their unique status as Chicagoans—both as established members of Chicago’s rapidly expanding population, but also as outsiders and the targets of prejudice—their involvement in the City’s most nascent socialist dissident groups should come as no surprise. German Craft Unionists made up the majority of the Workingmen’s Party (later dubbed the Socialist Labor Party), which would spearhead the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Participants in the strike would go on to form Arbeiter-Zeitung, one of the more notorious radical leftist papers of the 19th century Chicago labor movements; it’s no coincidence that the publication was a German-language one.

           While Germans were the first to come, they certainly were not the last; much like immigration trends in the United States at large, immigration to Chicago can be characterized by its successional character. The Italian population in Chicago, for example, was the third largest in the country of much of the 1900s. Italian immigration to Chicago would reach its zenith in the late 19th century, when Chicago’s burgeoning railroad industry served as a magnet for unskilled European laborers—Italian and otherwise. Interestingly, the Italian immigrant population was more resistant to being organized along class lines than were some other immigrant groups. This was in part because of its diffuse distribution about the city; more importantly, however, was the fact that Italians coming to America from a just-recently unified Italy carried with them the antagonisms and factionalisms of their homeland. So while Italian socialist organizations and their associated publications—such as the Italian Socialist Federation, which publishedLa Parola dei Socialisti—strove to build unite Italians in Chicago, their efforts were often in vain.

           A whole host of other immigrant groups were magnetized to the newly industrialized Chicago around the same time: Slovaks, in the 1880s and who came as unskilled laborers; the swedes, whose population also exploded in the 1880s; the Armenians, who were fleeing the oppressive (but waning) Ottoman regime in the 1890s and early 1900s; the list goes on. These immigrant groups settled in neighborhoods that continue to be working class neighborhoods to this day: Pilsen, Englewood, West Pullman, Near West Side, etc. For the most part, these groups converged on Chicago for its industry—these were unskilled workers who, in the face of destitution in their own countries, sought better lives in America. But Chicago attracted immigrant communities for more than just its labor opportunities. The Croatians were a remarkable example of this. American historians of Croatian immigration have called Chicago the “Second Croatian Capital”. While many who came were peasants that sought the same opportunities as their contemporaries, this was not true for all. Many Croatian dissidents—who for a long time had been a thorn in the side of the Austro-Hungarian empire—gravitated to the developing political scene in Chicago; and with them, they brought their activism. Croatian immigration is particularly relevant to our study of multilingual socialist publications in Chicago, insofar as 44 Croatian newspapers and magazines were founded in Chicagoland between 1892 and 1943—and many of these were starkly socialist in character. In that sense, the Croatian community in Chicago was a bit of a posterchild for the dynamic alliance we see forming between socialism and the immigrant-labor class at the turn of the century.

           As the 1900s progressed, socialism would become increasingly suppressed by the U.S. government. Nonetheless, Chicago would retain its identity as a center for activism and political dissidence, as illustrated by the city’s importance for the civil rights movement beginning in the mid-20thcentury.

Citation:

Rebecca Flores, Socialist Newspapers and Periodicals 1900-1920, Mapping American Social Movements Through the 20th Century. Retrieved 1/26/17 from http://depts.washington.edu/moves/ SP_map-newspapers.shtml

Rand McNally and Company., and Rand McNally and Company. Rand, McNally and Co.'s Street Number Guide Map of the Principal Part of Chicago: Rand, McNally & Co.'s Street Guide Map of Chicago and Suburbs Showing the City Limits. Chicago: Rand McNally & Co., 1902. Web.

Cronon, William. Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: W.W. Norton, 1991. Print.

Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2001.

Sclater, Karla Kelling, Labor and Radical Press: 1820-the Present, The great Depression in Washington State Project. Retrieved 28 Jan. 2017 from http://depts.washington.edu/labhist/laborpress/Kelling.shtml

Beyond the martyrs: a social history of Chicago's anarchists, 1870-1900 / Bruce C. Nelson.

Graff, Daniel A. “Socialist Parties.” Encyclopedia of Chicago. Chicago Historical Society, 2005. Web. 28 Jan. 2017

Morrissey, Robert. “Armenians.” Encyclopedia of Chicago. Chicago Historical Society, 2005. Web. 28 Jan. 2017

Harzig, Christine. “Germans.” Encyclopedia of Chicago. Chicago Historical Society, 2005. Web. 28 Jan. 2017

Vecoli, Rudolph J. “Italians.” Encyclopedia of Chicago. Chicago Historical Society, 2005. Web. 28 Jan. 2017

Seligman, Amanda. “Croatians.” Encyclopedia of Chicago. Chicago Historical Society, 2005. Web. 28 Jan. 2017