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Who needs April Fools when you start reading an article on the etymology of the Hebrew name of Egypt and end discovering that the Dick Dale tune Misirlou, famous as the theme tune for Pulp Fiction, is in fact a Greek rebetiko song about an Egyptian Muslim girl?
I heard Misirlou sung at Limmud, introduced as an old Chassidic niggun. I'm fairly certain it was intended as tongue-in-cheek, but the above article mentions it as having become such, and I'm most amused at how close to the truth that really is.
Here's an audio interview with Dick Dale about how he came to turn it into the surf rock version you're best likely to know; and here's an audio collage of versions of the song in different styles.
The interesting thing is how similar all the different versions are: when I hear a folk song having reached so many different genres, I expect them all to have difference from each other; but they're almost all the same, perhaps because the song's radiation happened so recently: the song is first attested in 1927, and probably doesn't go further back than the nineteenth century.
I heard Misirlou sung at Limmud, introduced as an old Chassidic niggun. I'm fairly certain it was intended as tongue-in-cheek, but the above article mentions it as having become such, and I'm most amused at how close to the truth that really is.
Here's an audio interview with Dick Dale about how he came to turn it into the surf rock version you're best likely to know; and here's an audio collage of versions of the song in different styles.
The interesting thing is how similar all the different versions are: when I hear a folk song having reached so many different genres, I expect them all to have difference from each other; but they're almost all the same, perhaps because the song's radiation happened so recently: the song is first attested in 1927, and probably doesn't go further back than the nineteenth century.
