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The taxi driver taking us from the airport into town needs no prompting when I ask him to tell me what the local indigenous music sounds like. “You want to hear the real stuff?” He reaches over to the passenger seat and produces a listings magazine. Having arrived to record a programme for Radio 4 called Greek Blues, I have an idea of what I'm looking for - and it doesn't seem unreasonable to suppose that I might find that here in Athens.

The jaunty bouzouki players who serenade diners in Monastiraki near the foot of the Acropolis may tally with some people's idea of Greek music. As long as you don't make me eat there, I don't have a problem with that. But they don't represent the stuff of Greekness any more than Daniel O'Donnell represents Irishness. The stuff I'm after is exotic, tarry and with a faintly foreboding air. I'll know it when I hear it, because I grew up listening to it.

In fact, it was the first music I heard. On Sundays in suburban Birmingham, when my parents' fish and chip shop was closed, it blared forlornly from the radiogram. I didn't think I was paying attention, but decades later I realised that I had memorised every one: the sorrowful stupor of Vassilis Tsitsanis' Cloudy Sunday; the illicit love described on Markos Vamvakaris' Francosyrian Girl; and the sonorous female tones of Haris Alexiou on When a Woman Drinks: “You tell me not to get drunk/ Because it's not allowed/ But you have no idea of the pain in my heart.”

Greek blues. To someone unfamiliar with this music, the term might sound like a contradiction. In fact, it's more like a tautology. Four centuries of Ottoman rule until the 20th century might have been tough for a once-proud empire to stomach (although we Greeks hardly needed encouragement. Even at the peak of Greek civilisation 2,500 years ago we still made time to invent tragedy). When pressed to define “real” Greek music, our taxi driver pointed us to rebetika. So the Greek blues has a name. But this was a word I never heard in my childhood, mainly because, by the time my parents were growing up, rebetika had been supplanted by its more well-scrubbed offspring laika - or, to use its literal meaning, “popular”.

My parents never stopped to tell me the real history of Greek music in this century - and, when I grew up and made my own inquiries, I realised why. The music that Greeks have come to recognise as their own was created in the hash dens or tekedhes that lined the port of Piraeus - much of it by Greeks and Turks forced to flee Smyrna (now Izmir) after the catastrophic Greek assault on the city ended in capitulation in 1922. The song titles speak for themselves. Rosa Eskenazi's Why I Smoke Cocaine; Anestis Delias' The Junkie's Complaint; Smoking the Hubble Bubble for Hours by Vamvakaris.

If none of those songs made it to our chip shop, it's hardly surprising. Vamvakaris was the Robert Johnson of rebetika, with a back story just as mythical as Johnson's crossroads encounter with the Devil. Having stowed away as a child from the island of Syros, he vowed to chop off his hand with a meat cleaver if he didn't learn to play the bouzouki within six months. On Why I Smoke Hooka Tobacco, in 1933, he sounds barely conscious - scratching out a minimal modal accompaniment on his bouzouki which wouldn't sound out of place on the first Velvet Underground album.

Anyway, my parents would have struggled to find this music on any records at the time. In 1936, the Greek music industry was in its infancy when Ioannis Metaxas' Fascist Government came to power. That Greece was adopting a form of music that hailed from Asia Minor was a huge embarrassment to Metaxas, who thought that everyone ought to be listening to Mozart.

Many of rebetika's foremost practitioners may have been refugees, but their camaraderie created a subculture of sharply-dressed, streetwise men. Just as Jamaica had its rude boys and hip-hop spawned male archetypes who identified themselves as “gangstas”, rebetika had the manga. “Hey mangas,” begins Poser, written in 1935 by Delias, shortly after acquiring the heroin addiction that ended his life. “If you're going to carry a knife/ You'd better have the guts, poser, to pull it out.” If Metaxas' instinct was to outlaw the people who made this music, what he actually did was far cleverer. He co-opted them. Tsitsanis removed cadences from his music that might be deemed “Asian” in character. Vamvakaris followed suit. “He simply had no choice,” says his son Stelios, also a musician. “The lyrics had to be generalised. If he wanted to carry on putting records out and feed his family, he needed to be careful not to fall foul of the censors.”

The effects of Metaxas' censorship have resounded throughout Greek life long after his demise. Take the case of Manos Hadjidakis, the man behind arguably the most well-known piece of Greek music in the past 100 years, Never on Sunday. In 1949 Hadjidakis gave a speech at the Arts Theatre in Athens, urging Greeks to embrace rebetika as an authentic expression of their Greekness. His words were greeted with such vilification that he was urged by the Greek chief of police to lie low for a few months. As his adopted son, George Hadjidakis, explains: “The feeling out there was that how could this man have the temerity to drag the rebetes, with their hashish, with their drug problems, on to the boulevards of uptown Athens.”

Undaunted, Hadjidakis assimilated rebetika melodies and lyrics into his own music. His achingly beautiful Six Folklore Melodies album was an act both political and artistic. “It didn't matter where this music had come from,” George Hadjidakis says. “After so many years under Ottoman rule, he realised that Greece didn't have a classical music to call its own. That's what he set about doing, using rebetika, traditional rural folk songs and Byzantine influences.” Compared with the job at hand, celebrity was a mere distraction. In 1964, months after Hadjidakis received his Oscar for Never on Sunday, his cleaner retrieved it from a bin bag.

Further decades of political instability have nurtured Greeks' anti-authoritarian tendencies and taught them to accept their wild rebetika forebears. In his 1985 album Rebetika of the Occupation, George Dalaras planted many of these songs into the mainstream for the first time, though not the ones about drugs. This year he and guest singers atoned for such omissions with the live album Songs with Substance, with such titles as Hashish and Hash Den Rumba. Newspaper leader columns attempted to whip up a little outrage. By and large, though, it seemed as though hearing Dalaras - a national treasure - extolling the virtues and vices of the narcotic life made it acceptable. “These are songs that [a generation of Greeks] didn't know existed,” the singer explains. “And now they do. Whatever you think of them, that has to be a good thing.”

Back at the foot of the Acropolis, those bouzoukis sound as jaunty as they did on our arrival. Where to find proper rebetika? The one safe bet lies a short ride from the harbour where it first arrived. Behind the drawn curtains of his Piraeus flat, 60-year-old Stelios Vamvakaris opens his bouzouki case and plays something exotic, tarry and with a faintly foreboding air. I might have been brought up on Greek blues but Vamvakaris sounds like a man orphaned by it, fated to search for its essence. Now, where could you find something that sounded like that? If only he could see what I'm seeing.

Greek Blues, Radio 4, July 8, 1.30pm

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