Giorgos Papadakis notes the following on the recordings made by the Greeks in America, and especially those concerning dimotiko (folk) music (see more in Giorgos Papadakis’ article "Ta dimotika ton diskon", http://www.music-art.gr/content/view/39/34/lang,el/): "The records recorded by the Greeks of America dominated in these years [1900-1930]. Together with the recordings made in Smyrna (Izmir) and Constantinople (Istanbul) before 1922, they were the first audio recordings of Greek songs in history. For the dimotiko (folk) songs that were recorded on those first records, one can make the following important remark: as a rule, the selections were made from an already established repertoire. It was established under completely different procedures from those that followed the development of the media.
The most genuine representatives of popular and dimotiko (folk) music have been recorded especially on the records that came from America. The influx of migrants had sent there, officially and legally, half a million Greeks and almost as many others illegal immigrants from areas that then did not belong to the Greek state; therefore, these people were not counted as Greeks (they came from Asia Minor, the Dodecanese, Epirus, Macedonia, Thrace, Crete). They were mostly farmers from the countryside. Those who at least played instruments or sang expressed musical experiences with a historical continuity of centuries, and songs and performances as they had been preserved through the natural processes of production and dissemination.
These immigrants set the first and true tone, the first sounds and the first guidelines of a true and real way of performance that was not 'fabricated' by the specialized 'professional artists' of the recordings that came a few years later. These artists were 'designed' to serve the big production companies.
These first recordings preserved voices and melodies that were treasured by folklore. They left behind them a lot of information to researchers regarding the singers and the performances. They are an archival material of high value regarding, for example, the notion of monophony. The way monophony was applied in these recordings (complete absence of chord accompaniments, performance of microintervals, etc.) constitutes the only audio recording and confirmation of various theories and hypotheses about Greek dimotiko (folk) music."