Misirlou
Eastern Mediterranean folk song performed by Dick Dale
"Misirlou" is a folk song from the Eastern Mediterranean region. The song's original author is unknown, but Arabic, Greek, and Jewish musicians were playing it by the 1920s. The earliest known recording of the song is a 1927 Greek rebetiko/tsifteteli composition. There are also Arabic belly dancing, Albanian, Armenian, Serbian, Persian, Indian and Turkish versions of the song. This song was popular from the 1920s onwards in the Arab American, Armenian American and Greek American communities who settled in the United States.
The song was a hit in 1946 for Jan August, an American pianist and xylophonist nicknamed "the one-man piano duet". It gained worldwide popularity through Dick Dale's 1962 American surf rock version, originally titled "Miserlou", which popularized the song in Western popular culture; Dale's version was influenced by an earlier Arabic folk version played with an oud. Various versions have since been recorded, mostly based on Dale's version, including other surf and rock versions by bands such as the Beach Boys, the Ventures, and the Trashmen, as well as international orchestral easy listening (exotica) versions by musicians such as Martin Denny and Arthur Lyman. Dale's surf rock version was heard in the 1994 film Pulp Fiction.
History
Name
Misirlou (Μισιρλού), due to the suffix "ou", is the feminine form (in Greek) of Misirlis (Μισιρλής- a surname) which comes from the Turkish word Mısırlı, which is formed by combining Mısır ("Egypt" in Turkish, borrowed from Arabic مِصر Miṣr) with the Turkish -lı suffix, literally meaning "Egyptian".
The public source identifies “Misirlou” as eastern Mediterranean folk song performed by Dick Dale. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Misirlou, Eastern and Mediterranean.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1497786. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1927, 1946, 1962 and 1994.
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This entry incorporates text from “Misirlou” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.