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Dick Dale
1937–2019
The “King of the Surf Guitar,” whose 1962 Misirlou (Μισιρλού) — learned from Lebanese uncles on the oud — became the life of the tune most of the world knows.
was born Richard Anthony Monsour in Massachusetts in 1937. His father was Lebanese; uncles played the eastern Mediterranean folk tune Misirlou on the oud, and Dale recast it as a one-string surf-guitar instrumental, released on Deltone in April 1962. The family had moved to Orange County, California, in 1954, where he took up surfing and built the reverb-heavy sound that defined the genre. Quentin Tarantino quoted the 1962 record over the opening of Pulp Fiction in 1994. Dale died in 2019, at 81.
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