Mick Hartley

Surf music with a touch of the Orient, from Dick Dale:

From the 1963 film "A Swingin' Affair".

Dale liked to claim he was from Beirut, though in fact he was born in Boston: it was his father who was Lebanese. But although he's acclaimed as the King of the Surf Guitar, with classics like Let's Go Trippin', there's a definite Arabic influence here:

It seems too strange to digest at first, that “Misirlou,” Dale’s most widely recognized tune, is based on an Arabic-language song, or that a number of his surf music classics have a distinctively Arabic sound. After all, what speaks more purely of that all-American California lifestyle than the high-energy, good-natured twang of surf music? Yet, in the portentous chords of Jan and Dean’s “Dead Man’s Curve” and in some of the early Beach Boys music – when they are not borrowing from Chuck Berry – the discerning ear can pick up not only the sounds of California beach communities, but a tantalizing hint of Beirut, Lebanon, Damascus, Syria, and Cairo, Egypt.

And if, in Dick Dale’s driving lead guitar and amazingly quick picking, you hear something of the tarabaki drum’s insistent rhythms and can see a classic Middle Eastern belly dancer sweeping across the floor, you are getting close to the source of the paradox.

In fact, this legendary guitarist’s name at birth was Richard Monsour – a name in which he still takes great pride, even if it does not sound as good on stage as Dick Dale. And the Middle Eastern roots that influenced his distinctive sound are long and deep. His paternal grandparents came to the United States from Beirut. His father, though born in Boston, spent most of his childhood in Lebanon, and Dale himself grew up speaking Arabic.

More important for the future of surf music, Dale came from a family of Arabic musicians. “My uncle taught me how to play the tarabaki, and I watched him play the oud. We used to play at the Maharjan” – a Lebanese nightspot in Boston – “while my relatives belly-danced,” he recalled during a recent interview with the Washington File. Though only a boy when he took up the instrument, Dale’s early tarabaki drumming proved such a huge influence on his guitar playing that he says he is still simply playing drums on his guitar strings. “It’s the pulsation,” he says of his distinctive sound, saying that whether he is playing guitar, trumpet or piano, “they all have that drumming beat I learned by playing the tarabaki.”

When the Monsour family moved to Southern California in the 1950s, Dale picked up a new passion for surfing. That passion soon led to the birth of a new genre of music. “I didn’t really think of it as surf music,” he says now. But when he began to play his unique high-energy sound at concerts in the beach towns near Los Angeles, his fellow surfers quickly dubbed him the King of the Surf Guitar. To anyone who knew him, the sound of the surf came across strongly in his music.

So did his Arabic heritage, which, through a promise to a young fan, gave Dale what may be his signature tune. The fan was a young boy who attended one of Dale’s first concerts and asked if Dale could play a song on one string, as Middle Eastern oud players can. Dale said that he could and promised to play it at his concert the following night. “That night I went to bed and couldn’t sleep,” he laughs now. “I was almost crying,” he says, for fear he would not be able to keep his promise. “Then I remembered my uncle playing ‘Misirlou,’” on one string.

Yale Strom, an ethnologist and artist-in-residence at San Diego State University, says that Misirlou – “The Egyptian” – is played in distinctive Arab modalities and has characteristic Eastern Mediterranean syncopated rhythms that usually are played by the drums.

Oh dear. Sounds like cultural appropriation to me.