Today’s classic song of the day is a surf rock instrumental classic, Dick Dale’s “Misirlou.” It was released as a single in April of 1962 but never cracked the Billboard Hot 100. In spite of that, it’s become a classic that everyone of a certain age recognizes.
The song “Miserlou” (originally spelled “Misirlou”) is a traditional Greek folk song. It migrated from the Ottoman Empire to the U.S. sometime in the 1920s. The earliest known recording of “Misirlou” was made in 1927 by Tetos Demetriades, a Greek musician. Nick Roubanis, a Greek-American musician, recorded a jazz instrumental version in 1941, and Harry James did a big band version that same year that peaked at #22 on the charts. Pianist Jan August turned it into a pop hit in 1946; his version reached #7 on the Billboard chart.
Dick Dale rearranged the song as an instrumental rock guitar piece in 1962. The legend goes that Mr. Dale was challenged by an audience member at one of his local gigs to play a song on only one string of his guitar. Mr. Dale remembered seeing his uncle play the folk song “Misirlou” on one string of the oud, a traditional Mediterranean instrument, so he gave it a go on his Fender Stratocaster. The rest is surf music history.
You might know “Miserlou” from Quentin Tarantino’s use of the song to open his 1994 movie, Pulp Fiction. This wasn’t the first appearance of a Dick Dale song in the movies; Mr. Dale himself appeared with his band the Del-Tones in two Frankie and Annette beach movies, 1963’s Beach Party and 1964’s Muscle Beach Party.
Dick Dale was dubbed “King of the Surf Guitar,” which begs the question, what exactly is the Surf Guitar sound? Here’s how Mr. Dale described it:
“The sound is a Stratocaster guitar. It’s the solidity of the wood—the thicker the wood, the bigger and purer the sound. It was a Strat. Not the Jaguar, not the Jazzmaster, all these things we created later, for different reasons. Even the reverb—reverb had nothing to do with the surfing sound, and here they got ’em on the cover going ‘That’s the wet, splashy sound of reverb.’ No! We created the reverb because Dick Dale did not have a natural vibrato on his voice. I wanted to sustain my notes while singing. So we copied the Hammond organ, which had a tank in it. We took the tank out, rewired it, and had an outboard reverb! It was for the vocal. Our first album, Surfer’s Choice, sold over 88,000 albums—locally! That’s like more than 4 million today. Dick Dale was already established as King of the Surf Guitar, and that album did not have reverb on it. It wasn’t even invented!”
Dick Dale was born in 1937 and got his start in 1961 playing with his band the Del-Tones for surfers at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa, California. He hit it big with the single “Let’s Go Trippin'” and kept playing his left-handed Strat for the rest of his life. He passed away in 2019; he was 81 years old.
And here’s a real treat. It’s Dick Dale and his Del-Tones performing “Miserlou” at the Harmony Park Ballroom in Anaheim, California, in 1962. The raw power in his playing was unmatched.
