Here Marika Ninou (Μαρίκα Νινου) sings in the Piraian style, a song of remonstration against false accusations. Up until the mid 40s vocals in the Piraian style had been the domain of horse voiced men. Under influence of Tsitsanis, Soteria Bella and Marika Ninou introduced women's voices to this style and added to it's artistic range. The famous film Rebetika is in part patterned after her life. Ninou was actually from an ethnically Armenian family, studying in Armenian schools in Greece; her first musical experience were singing in the Armenian church. In fact, one can't help but be struck by the similarities of the female Rebetika vocal style and the plain chant female choirs of the of the Armenian church.
As with many Rebetico lyrics, the meaning of these are somewhat ambiguous. While a straight forward interpretation of the lyrics would be that sung by a woman falsely accused. It's equally possible to interpret them as a rhetorical exercise: that in fact she is not falsely accused: the singer's agenda being to find out what it is that her lover knows and make an emotional appeal, however authentically felt, to persuade him that what he's heard is false. That be the case too, but we the listener can't know the real truth, nor can we however, fail to be persuaded by her appeal.
