I found “Misirlou” by accident, while scrolling through Spotify looking for something recorded before 1950 that I actually knew. I’ve heard “Miserlou” a hundred times, as in the Dick Dale surf song. Once as the hook in “Pump It” by the Black Eyed Peas, and in many different places in pop culture. The remastered version on Spotify was credited to Dick Dale & His Del-Tones, released 2006. I searched it online hoping the original recording was before 1950. It was, but it wasn’t Dale’s. It was a 1927 recording by a man named Tetos Demetriades, a Greek refugee who had arrived in New York six years earlier after being expelled from Istanbul. The further I looked into it, the stranger the story got. Demetriades hadn’t written it either. Nobody had, or at least nobody with documentation. The copyright ended up claimed by someone who also didn’t write it. What I thought was a surf rock guitar piece turned out to have roots in a folk tradition produced by one of the largest forced population exchanges of the twentieth century.
Theodotos “Tetos” Demetriades was born in Istanbul in 1897, when the city was still called Constantinople and still belonged to the Ottoman Empire. He grew up in a place where Greek, Turkish, and Arabic musical cultures had overlapped for centuries. A city where the same place might play music that belonged to all three cultures at the same time, and nobody labeled it. The melody he would eventually record in New York was almost certainly something he absorbed growing up there, long before anyone pressed it onto a record.
He left Istanbul in 1921 as part of the mass expulsion of Greeks from Turkey during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, a process formalized under the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 (Greek Genocide Resource Center, n.d.). He ended up in New York, established himself as a singer and guitarist in the Greek-American community, and in July 1927 recorded “Misirlou” for Columbia Records. The release, Columbia 56073-F, was a vocal performance backed by orchestra, aimed squarely at the Greek immigrant community that had recently arrived on the East Coast. He spent the rest of his career working in the Greek-American recording industry, eventually moving into record production, and died in New Jersey in 1971 (Greek City Times, 2023).
His name is on the record as the singer, not the composer. That’s because nobody owned the composition. Nikos Roubanis holds the copyright on “Misirlou” despite not having written it, and the actual origin of the melody is genuinely unknown (Greek Genocide Resource Center, n.d.). This is the reality of a lot of folk music, especially the music of a people that was displaced.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tT3CSg7HmmY&list=RDtT3CSg7HmmY&start_radio=1
The thing that surprised me most when I listened to Demetriades’ recording back-to-back with Dale’s was how different they feel despite sharing the exact same melody. Dale’s version is immediately exciting, it feels badass. Even before you listen to the song, the cover of Dale’s version evokes surfing a huge wave, or just thrill. Demetriades’ version is slower and more cinematic. It’s the same melody, it’s not like the similarities are hard to find. Demetriades’ interpretation is honestly a bit haunting, it lingers on the dissonance and drama a little more. The two versions side by side reminded me of “Caravan”. I first heard it as the finale in Whiplash, this driving, unhinged band performance. Then I heard the same melody in a totally different context while watching Ocean’s Eleven, and it hit completely differently. Similar to Misirlou, the same melody carried a completely different emotional weight.
What both versions of “Misirlou” share is the underlying scale. The title translates roughly from Greek as “Egyptian girl,” from the Turkish word for Egypt. The melody is built on the Hijaz maqam, a mode common across Turkish, Arabic, and Greek musical traditions. Its defining feature is a single augmented second interval between the second and third scale degrees, which gives it that characteristic pull between tension and resolution. Demetriades would have grown up hearing this constantly in Istanbul. Dale, who learned the tune from his Lebanese family, knew it from a different direction.
Demetriades sings it with his unique ornamentation, small slides and ornamental turns around individual notes characteristic of Greek and Turkish vocal performance. Dale translates it into a single-string guitar run played as fast as possible. The maqam survives the translation. The vocal tradition doesn’t, and neither does the original feeling. The instability of the song’s form across early recordings is itself significant. Demetriades recorded it in 1927 with Greek lyrics and orchestral backing. Michalis Patrinos recorded his own version in 1931, calling it “Mousourlou” and mixing Persian words into otherwise Greek lyrics. Roubanis, the same man who held the copyright, put out a jazz-inflected version in 1941, departing completely from the 1927 arrangement (Greek Genocide Resource Center, n.d.). Three recordings, three titles, three completely different treatments. Nobody here is covering a fixed composition. Each musician is treating a folk melody as raw material, which is exactly what it was.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Qd2Nb-oh4I&list=RD1Qd2Nb-oh4I&start_radio=14
The recording exists because of a political catastrophe. During World War I, the Ottoman government carried out a genocide against the Greek, Armenian, and Assyrian populations of Anatolia. Demetriades left Istanbul in 1921 as part of that displacement. Roughly 1.5 million Greeks were expelled from Anatolia, around 500,000 Muslims from Greece, under the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 (Greek Genocide Resource Center, n.d.). An entire cultural world, centuries in the making, was dismantled in about a decade.
Rebetiko is the music that came out of that rupture. Made by refugees in port cities and immigrant neighborhoods. The genre’s loose approach to authorship reflects its conditions of production. Music that passes through displacement camps and tenement apartments doesn’t come with documented songwriters. Songs travel the way people do: informally, reshaped each time they move. The copyright on “Misirlou” going to Roubanis rather than whoever actually wrote is a result of how that world worked. The audience that bought Demetriades’ record in 1927 had lived through the same displacement he had. For them, the Hijaz maqam, the Turkish and Arabic loanwords in the lyrics, and the vocal ornaments were all a piece of a sonic world they had been separated from by force, made available again in a New York record shop, by one of their own.
“Misirlou” had two completely separate lives in American music, forty years apart, and they barely connect. And then multiple lives after if you count its use in movies, samples, etc. The first ran through the 1930s and 1940s. After Patrinos’ 1931 version and Roubanis’ 1941 recording, English lyrics were written by Bob Russell, Fred Wise, and Milton Leeds. Mitchell Ayres recorded that English-language version in 1941 (Greek City Times, 2023). By that point the song had moved out of the Greek immigrant community and into mainstream American popular music, picking up new writers and new arrangements at each step.
The second life started independently in 1962, when Dick Dale rearranged the melody into a surf rock instrumental. Dale had never heard Demetriades’ recording. He learned the tune from his Lebanese family and has been explicit about it: for him the song is not Greek, it’s an Arabic folk melody passed down through his own family (The Guitar, n.d.). His version is the one I knew before any of this. There’s something about how the chromatic tension in that maqam translates into a surf guitar riff that works. It sounds like it was always supposed to be there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXB6T55oytE&list=RDMXB6T55oytE&start_radio=1
By 1962, two immigrant communities were each claiming the same melody as part of their own folk heritage, with no awareness of each other’s claims. And the best part is that both were right. The song had always crossed the boundaries people would later try to draw around it. Yes, Dale’s version is the one that stuck. It resurfaced in 1994 as the opening theme of Pulp Fiction, which locked in his arrangement as the “Miserlou” most people now know (Greek Genocide Resource Center, n.d.). For most listeners today, the song carries no history. It’s the Pulp Fiction song. No Demetriades, no Dale family, no Ottoman Empire. The notes stay the same, the history gets left behind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaI2IlHwmgQ&list=RDZaI2IlHwmgQ&start_radio=1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOoBomvuYnw6
Demetriades’ 1927 recording documents a specific historical rupture: the end of Ottoman Greek life in Asia Minor and the start of a Greek-American community rebuilding itself in New York. The song has no single author because it never belonged to one person. It moved through overlapping communities in the Ottoman world before anyone wrote it down, and kept moving after. The same authorless melody entered American popular music twice, forty years apart, carried by two separate immigrant communities who each thought it was theirs. Neither was wrong.
Works Cited
Discography of American Historical Recordings. (n.d.). Columbia matrix W205625. Misirlou (Μισιρλου) / Tetos Demetriades (Τετος Δημητριαδης). University of California, Santa Barbara Library.
Greek City Times. (2023, September 25). The enigmatic ‘Misirlou’: Unraveling the story behind
Greek Genocide Resource Center. (n.d.). Misirlou: The song made famous by a Greek genocide
The Guitar. (n.d.). Guitar legend Dick Dale, “Misirlou” at the start.