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Τέτος Δημητριάδης | Tetos Demetriades
the greek immigrant musician in the 20's(historical recordings in America)
Tetos (Theodotos) Demetriades was a composer and singer from a family in Istanbul (where he was born in 1897) who immigrated to America in 1921 (a time of great unrest and conflict that ended with the Asia Minor Catastrophe and the uprooting of the Greeks). In the spring of 1922 he began recording on behalf of the American Recording Companies: Columbia and Victor (after 1927 he continued exclusively with the latter). For RCA Victor and its subsidiary Orthophonic (which was managed by Tetos for Greek and Turkish music releases), he made many trips to Greece (and Turkey) between 1929 and 1935 and recorded with other classical organists, singers and rebetes of the season.
The recorded work of the composer, guitarist, lyricist, singer, director, actor and producer extends to various genres such as orchestrated pop songs, operetta, rebetika (greek-folk songs) and well-known light songs of the time in Greece. Much of this audio material was recorded and thus saved on hundreds of 78 rpm shellac records until the end of World War II. He used several pseudonyms to give a different identity but also possibly to escape the record obligations, among them: Tetos Demetriades, Takis Nikolaou, Nontas Sgouros, Tetos Demey and Tedis. He was the brother of the singer Tassia Demetriades and the cartoonist Fokionas Dimitriadis (whose work adorns the cover of the collection). Tetos Demetriades recorded the traditional Eastern Mediterranean song "Misirlou" (roughly translates to "Arab Land") for the first time in July 1927 in New York. It was noy until 1934 that Nikos Roubanis (a Greek-American Byzantine music teacher) submitted a copyright claim to the music of "Misirlou".
In the late 30's and 40's Tetos took various positions in the RCA Record label while until 1945 he was in charge of International A&R. In the late 1940s, on his personal farm in New Jersey, he set up his own disc-cutting vinyl factory, and also founded a copyright management company. Through its own Standard Phono Company it expands into non-English speaking markets with numerous releases in Russian, Polish, Latin American, Italian, German, French, Hungarian, Irish, Scandinavian, Czech, Slovak and Hebrew. Thus in 1950 Teto's record label was characterized by Billboard as one of the most important American companies specializing in international repertoire. The selections were based on less popular artists and recordings that in the long run increased sales from the usual lightweight selection chart hits.
Tetos rarely donated free promo records to producers of shows and radios and did not stop collaborating and recording young and unknown artists from around the world for decades. The slogan he used for his company was "A World Of Music"! Standard (later known as Colonial) went through all the stages of record production, 78rpm records for gramophones, LPs and 7 "singles, 33rpm and 45rpm. Its releases existed until the late 60's and it is unknown when Tetos Demetriades died and what happened to both his huge archive and his record label itself.
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