I heard this gnarly piece again the other day and realised I’d somehow never added it to my music library project. What surprised me was learning that Dick Dale’s explosive surf-rock take on Miserlou (often spelled Misirlou) traces back to a folk tune from the Eastern Mediterranean in the 1920s. No single author is known, but Arabic, Greek and Jewish musicians were already playing it by then, and the earliest confirmed recording comes from a 1927 Greek rebetiko/tsifteteli composition.
There are more versions than you could poke a stick at, and it’s interesting how each version works of Misirlou because the melody itself is stubborn and memorable. Yet the first time I recall hearing it was in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994), where it just slices straight through the film’s opening. He treated it as if it were jolt to wake up a ’90s audience.
Dale’s 1962 recording was huge because he pushed it with such physical intensity by wanting to see how fast he could play it on a single string – a challenge rooted in his Lebanese heritage and childhood memories of oud and mizmar melodies. That ferocity, paired with Fender’s custom-built Showman amps, birthed what many now think of as the sound of surf guitar. It’s wild, how there’s also a clear line connecting the piece back to older Middle Eastern scales and phrasing.
References:
1. Misirlou – Wikipedia
2. Songfacts – Miserlou
“The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.”- Michel Legrand
Observation Blogger 
One of the classic instrumentals of the ’60s. I had forgotten «Miserlou» was in «Pulp Fiction» – granted, it’s been more than 25 years I watched that picture on TV. I didn’t catch it on the big screen when it came out.
I’d only ever heard it in the movie, and when I finally heard it in its own space, I knew I had to write about it. Then I learned it’s often cited as the first true piece of surfer music — which is pretty cool.