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Amalia Bakas was a Greek singer and performer in the United States during the 20th century. She was heavily involved in the "Eighth Avenue scene" in New York City and in Greek communities around the United States. Her repertoire consisted of mostly traditional songs to which she added her own style and words. Unlike other singers of the time, her songs were mostly about love. She also wrote two songs, "Elenitsa Mou" after she was baptized and "Diamontoula Mou" for her daughter. Little is known about Bakas before her time in the United States. She was born in Ioannina in the Janina Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire in a Romaniote Jewish community. The Romaniote community was male-dominated and births of females were not even recorded which may account for lack of information of Amalia’s early life. In 1912, when Bakas was 15 years old, she traveled to America on the Kaiser Franz Josef I ocean liner. She was detained at Ellis Island, lacking the necessary $50 fee until a phone call to a relative was made, who paid the fee for her. In 1913, she married Jack Saretta, also from Ioannina and they lived on Rivington Street on the Lower East Side in New York, NY. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amalia_...) under Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...)
