Real name Salomon Amzellag (a Berber-sounding surname), Samy was born in 1922 in Safi, a Moroccan town on the Atlantic coast, but grew up in the capital, Rabat. Attracted to Andalusian music, he learned to play the lute on his own, before training at the local conservatory and with the great masters of the genre. He is considered one of the first modernizers of Andalusian and it's popular derivatives, bringing more intensity to the rhythms, more imagination to the melodies and shortening the pieces to make them more digestible and muscular.During the 1950s-1960s, he performed numerous standards as well as songs of his own reflecting social life and the damage caused by colonialism. He moved to Paris for a time, set up his own label under the name Samyphone and met his North African "compatriots" of all faiths (he would say: "Art has taught us to be brothers"). In 1960, he moved to Canada, where he continued to perform and record for seven years. He became a rabbi in 1967, and decided to devote himself exclusively to religious songs. To the dismay of his many admirers, he returned to popular song, explaining that secular and cultic are not so antinomic. Samy El Magribi passed away in 2008, leaving behind him a magnificent repertoire, the full flavor of which can be found in these recordings.