Layers of Identity in the 1960s Surf Rock Icon Misirlou

Abstract

Misirlou 1 is widely recognized as an icon of surf rock, a category that, together with surf pop, constitutes the surf music genre that emerged in 1961. Surf music reflected and gave expression to the rather short-lived idealistic and carefree existence of ‘white’ urban youth culture in Southern California before the social and political changes of the psychedelic, conscience-ridden counterculture era took hold. However, while Misirlou is an iconic example of a specific musical age and genre, it is also found in other ages and cultural traditions. It has been described as a Lebanese belly-dance melody, a popular Greek song, an Arabian serenade, a ‘Terkisher’ (Turkish piece) in Klezmer repertoire, and is now known to many as the theme from the film Pulp Fiction. In each case, the style and language of lyric (when there is one) adjusts to milieu, but the melody is always recognizably the same. The journey of Misirlou from folk music to the global surf rock idiom of the 1960s is in itself a narrative worth recounting, but the fact that this singular piece of music simultaneously inhabits more than one musical tradition also provides a springboard for exploring broader claims of musical identity.

Notes

 1 The title of this piece appears in a variety of spellings, including Misirlou, Misirli, Missirlu, Misrlou, Miserlou and Mousourlou. Unless quoting from a particular source, the author will adhere to the most popular spelling which is Misirlou.

 2 Released on the Deltone label, disc number 5019. Deltone was an independent record company owned and managed by Dale's father Jim Monsour. One of the many websites on which the piece may be heard is (accessed 8 July 2010) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CboBCOnSHeI

 3 David McGee, ‘Dick Dale Biography’, The New Rolling Stone Album Guide 2004 (accessed 20 October 2009), http://www.rollingstone.com/artists/dickdale/biography

 4 See (accessed 16 November 2008) http://www.cozyrocket.com/category/surf-music

 5 See (accessed 12 November 2008) http://www.dinosaurgardens.com/?s=misirlou&submit=GO

 6 A Library of Congress recording published in August 1939, for example, lists Misirlou as a Greek–Arabian folksong. This hybrid descriptor was supplied by vocalist Mary Gianèskis in the brief interview prefacing her a cappella performance (in Greek) of the song. The recording can be accessed online at the American Memory Library of Congress website, which holds material from the Florida Folklife from the WPA Collections, 1937–1942; the direct link for the Gianèskis version is (accessed 12 April 2010) http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.afc/afcflwpa.3542a6. The notes accompanying the recording reveal that Tarpon Springs in Florida was settled by Greek sponge fishers in 1905; presumably Gianèskis was part of that Greek community. Another version of Misirlou, sung in Greek by Jennie Castrounis and published in October 1939, is also included on this site, but is listed as a Greek–Arabian love song. The direct link for this version is (accessed 12 April 2010) http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.afc/afcflwpa.3548b2

 7 In June 2002, the duo Sruli and Lisa released their Klezmer Dance Party album (SISU Home Entertainment, Inc., UPC 737138707128), which includes Miserlou/Terkishers as an item of Klezmer music of Turkish origin. Terkishers translates as Turkish.

 8 According to the discussion on Lee Hartsfeld's ‘Vintage Lounge’ website of ‘lounge, easy-listening and exotica music’ (accessed 3 November 2008), http://vintagelounge.blogspot.com/2005/10/four-versions-of-misirlou.html, Misirlou probably derives from an Egyptian popular song called Bint Misr, see below.

 9 One website lists over sixty different recordings; see (accessed 16 November 2008) http://www.spaceagepop.com/misirlou.htm

10 Frederik Barth, ‘Boundaries and Connections’, in Anthony P. Cohen (ed.), Signifying Identities: Anthropological Perspectives on Boundaries and Contested Values (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 30.

11 Martin Stokes, ‘Introduction: Ethnicity, Identity and Music’, in Martin Stokes (ed.), Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place (Oxford; Providence: Berg, 1994), 5.

12 Sara Cohen, ‘Identity, Place and the “Liverpool Sound”, in Stokes, Ethnicity, Identity and Music, 131; quoting J. Berland, ‘Locating Listening: Technological Space, Popular Music, Canadian Meditations’, Cultural Studies 2/3 (1988), 347.

13 Malcolm Chapman, ‘Thoughts on Celtic Music’, in Stokes, Ethnicity, Identity and Music, 6 and 29–44.

14 Georgina Born, ‘Introduction IV. Music and the Representation/Articulation of Sociocultural Identities’, in Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh (eds), Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 31–2.

15 Rockabilly was a mixture of blues, country and gospel music with a strong driving beat, and characterized the early rock'n'roll sound of Elvis Presley, Bill Haley, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and many more.

16 Dale was interviewed on the Discover Songs programme, which was aired on the American radio station NPR (8 January 2006). The interview is available online at the NPR website (accessed 20 October 2008 and 15 October 2009), http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5134530

17 During the interview, Dale demonstrates vocally the rhythms shown in Figures 2 and 3. These have been transcribed by the author.

18 Darbuka (also known as Derbaki, Doumbek) is a goblet-shaped drum with skin stretched over the end that has the wider diameter. It is a popular instrument for dance music throughout the Middle East. Hand-held sideways on one's lap, usually over one leg, the powerful sounding rhythms are produced with an energetic playing style.

19 To hear the Sombati and Maqsuum rhythms, and for more infomation about them, visit the “Middle Eastern Rhythms FAQ” page, <http://www.khafif.com/rhy/>. For notated examples of Maqsuum, see Anne K. Rasmussen, “The Arab World” in Jeff Todd Titan (ed), Worlds of Music: An Introduction to the Music of the World's Peoples, 5th edn (Belmont, Canada: Schirmer Cengage Learning, 2009), 478.

23 Malcolm Gault-Williams, Legendary Surfers: A Definitive History of Surfing's Culture and Heroes, 2 February 2008 (accessed 30 June 2010), http://files.legendarysurfers.com/surf/legends/lsc212.html#dick_dale

20 Duane Eddy pioneered this style of twangy guitar-playing and influenced many guitarists who associated the style and sound with surf music. See Katherine Charlton, Rock Music Styles: A History, 5th ed. (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2008), 79.

21 For Dale's fascination with Gene Krupa and his drumming style, see Roctober #8 (1994) (accessed 3 November 2009), http://www.roctober.com/roctober/greatness/dickdale.html. This issue contains an online written record of a telephone interview with Dick Dale by James Porter and Jake Austen, published under the title The Really Bitching Tale of Dick Dale as Told by the Man Himself.

22 This comment appears in the booklet accompanying the CD remake of Dale's first album Surfers' Choice (Sundazed Music, SC 11184, 2006).

24 Steve Huey included this information in his ‘Dick Dale Biography’ page of the All Music Guide, 2008 (accessed 22 October 2009), http://www.pandora.com/music/artist/dick+dale.

25 Gault-Williams, Legendary Surfers. Dale's claim is somewhat overstated. One of his older contemporaries, Les Paul, was responsible for a similarly effective electric guitar produced by the Gibson Guitar Corporation and named the Gibson Les Paul. The Les Paul, like the Stratocaster, has endured among rock guitarists.

26 Gault-Williams, Legendary Surfers.

27 Porter and Austen, Roctober #8, 1994 (accessed 3 November 2009), http://www.roctober.com/roctober/greatness/dickdale.html

28 The Rendezvous Ballroom had its heyday during the big band era of the 1930s and early 1940s, subsequently falling into relative disuse. It was revived by Dick Dale and his father, a record producer and entrepreneur, in the late 1950s and early 1960s with the surf music craze. The Ballroom was razed by a fire in 1966.

29 Glenn A. Baker, External Combustion (Sydney: Horwitz/Grahame, 1990), 156–8. This ‘white’ ethnicity of surf music is also assumed in Ronald Rodman's commentary on the use of Misirlou in Pulp Fiction cited below.

30 For example, Gault-Williams—paraphrasing Phil Dirt, whom he considers a surf-music authority—writes, ‘the reason why Surf Music was so easily killed-off, … in 1964, was because it had degraded to the Beach Boys style rather than continuing to rely on instrumentals with reverb’; Gault-Williams, Legendary Surfers.

31 See (accessed 6 June 2010) http://www.migrationheritage.nsw.gov.au/exhibition/objectsthroughtime/surfboard/. By the early 1960s, surfing had become enormously popular in Australia generally; as noted in Peter Beilby and Michael Roberts (eds), Australian Music Directory (North Melbourne: Australian Music Directory Pty. Ltd, 1981), 27.

32 From an interview with Tarantino in Jonathan Romney and Adrian Wootton, Celluloid Jukebox: Popular Music and the Movies since the 50s (London: British Film Institute, 1995), 130–1.

33 See Anahid Kassabian, Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), 52–5.

35 Diegesis means actually occurring within the time and space world of the film's narrative.

36 Ronald Rodman, ‘The Popular Song as Leitmotif in 1990s Film’, in Phil Powrie and Robynn Stilwell (eds), Changing Tunes: The Use of Pre-existing Music in Film (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 126.

34 Romney and Wootton, Celluloid Jukebox, 127.

37 This science-fiction movie was released in 1997 by Columbia Pictures. Although Men in Black was produced after Space Jam, the ambiguity of the allusion is relevant to post-1997 audiences watching the movie on DVD or as re-runs on television.

38 Philip Lambert, Inside the Music of Brian Wilson: The Songs, Sounds, and Influences of the Beach Boys' Founding Genius (New York: Continuum, 2007), 69.

39 Her performance may be viewed online (accessed 8 July 2010), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AURm7GY-Uj4

40 While the sense in which maqam is used here is as a ‘scale’, the term inheres far more meaning. According to the website (accessed 9 December 2009), http://www.pizmonim.org/?/maqam.htm, ‘maqam’ literally means place, location or rank and is a system of melodic modes used in traditional Arabic music. Each maqam is steeped in a tradition that determines the types of phrases used, important notes, melodic development and modulation. Both compositions and improvizations in traditional Arabic music are based on the maqam system. According to H.H. Touma, the system is organized into eight main maqam genres and their subsets, which range from a minimum of six to a maximum of twenty-one maqam depending on the genre. For further information on maqam theory, see Habib Hassan Touma, The Music of the Arabs, trans. Laurie Schwartz (Portland, Oregon: Amadeus Press, 1996), 17–45. Other cultural traditions also include the maqam system as a basis for some of their music.

41 For the Hijāzkār family of modes, see (accessed 9 December 2009) http://www.maqamworld.com/maqamat/hijaz-kar.html. The scale in Figure 7 is part of that family.

42 Nuftali Zvi Margolies Abulafia, an orthodox Rabbi living in New York, sang the religious song Eliyahu Hanavi to the Misirlou melody. His grandson Lionel Ziprin recorded this example in the 1950s; it was aired on the NPR Discover Songs programme (mentioned previously) on 1 and 8 January 2006.

43 See A.Z. Idelsohn, Jewish Music in its Historical Development (New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1948), 84–91.

44 The potential Mongol ancestry of either scale does not contest this regional description of the melody because the Mongol Empire extended to parts of the Middle East. All it does is add to the ambiguity of origin.

45 The region includes the northern countries such as Albania, Bosnia-Hergovina, Croatia, France, Greece, Italy, Malta, Monaco, Serbia-Montenegro, Slovenia, Spain; and the south-eastern countries such as Algeria, Cyprus, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Morocco, Libya, Palestinian Authority, Syria, Tunisia, and Turkey.

46 Tullia Magrini, ‘Introduction: Studying Gender in Mediterranean Musical Culture’, in Tullia Magrini (ed.), Music and Gender: Perspectives from the Mediterranean (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 20.

47 Marcello Sorce Keller, ‘Why is Music So Ideological, and Why Do Totalitarian States Take it So Seriously? A Personal View from History and the Social Sciences’, Journal of Musicological Research 26/2 (2007), 102.

48 The interview was part of the previously mentioned NPR programme aired on 8 January 2006 and is available online (accessed 4 November 2008), http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5134530

49 Holst-Warhaft provides an account of the history and development of rebetika from a gender studies perspective. Gail Holst-Warhaft, ‘The Female Dervish and Other Shady Ladies of the Rebetika’, in Magrini, Music and Gender, 169–94.

50 Source: http://www.greeksongs-greekmusic.com/misirlou-greek-lyrics/ (accessed 30 July 2010).

51 Holst-Warhaft, ‘The Female Dervish’, 172.

52 Ibid., 169.

53 Elijah Wald, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock'n'Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 126–7.

54 See 12:33 pm entry, 5 October 2005 (accessed 3 November 2008), http://vintagelounge.blogspot.com/2005/10/four-versions-of-misirlou.html

55 For more information about Sayyed Darwīsh, see Nezar Mrouhe, ‘Sayyed Darwish, Major Arab Music Pioneer’, Aljadid: A Review & Record of Arab Culture and Arts 5/29 (fall 1999), available online (accessed 16 December 2009), http://aljadid.com/music/0529mrouhe.html

56 See 6:50 pm entry, 5 October 2005 (accessed 3 November 2008), http://vintagelounge.blogspot.com/2005/10/four-versions-of-misirlou.html

57 Ali Jihad Racy, ‘Record Industry and Egyptian Traditional Music: 1904–1932’, Ethnomusicology 20/1 (1976), 43.

58 Nicolette Vassilopolous, personal communication, 23 November 2009. According to Vassilopolous, a scholar of Greek language, the Greek term for Egypt is Aigyptos (Αίγυπτος).

59 The term Sephardi denotes the Spanish derived cultural stream of Judaism; as opposed to Ashkenazi, which refers to the German and East European-derived cultural stream.

60 Edwin Seroussi, ‘Archivists of Memory: Written Folksong Collections of Twentieth Century Sephardi Women’, in Magrini, Music and Gender, 205.

61 According to Mike Boehm's report in the Los Angeles Times (14 January 1998), Hankus Netsky—a Klezmer musician and scholar—maintained that Misirlou has been in America's Klezmer repertoire since the 1920s.

62 Interestingly, Hesmondhalgh and Born observe that ‘Popular music studies, in contrast to its critical treatment of the borrowing by Western pop superstars of non-Western styles, has tended to celebrate the proliferation of new musical forms based on the encounter of non-Western migrants with Western musical languages and technologies’. David Hesmondhalgh and Georgina Born, ‘Introduction III. Othering, Hybridity, and Fusion in Transnational Popular Musics’, in Born and Hesmondhalgh, Western Music and Its Others, 26.

63 Released in 1950 on the Banner Records label (album number BAS–1017, New York). The Yiddish lyrics are attributed to his wife Miriam Kressyn, who wrote them in the 1940s.

64 Recent ethnomusicological research has made the concept of the exotic in music a cause célèbre, calling attention to persisting western imperialist and colonialist attitudes that underlie many of the cultural biases in perceiving music and that generate questionable practices involved in the commodification and globalization of localized indigenous musics. See, for example, Timothy D. Taylor, Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007).

65 This album compilation was released in 2008 as a compact disc on the Acrobat label, and may be heard online (accessed 8 July 2010), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbYjZbGHbhM