Mike Patrinos, My mousourlou (Misirlou)

March 26, 2025

Record label with a blue background and gold print of the label Columbia and Greek writing for the song name Mousourlou

I’m confused. Mike Patrinos may also have been Haris Patrinos. Or perhaps Dinos Theodopoulos. Online sources are contradictory and unclear.

Theodopoulos was a great innovator of karagiozos, the Greek puppet shadow theatre. Biographical information is slender: he spent part of his youth in the U.S. before returning to Greece. On YouTube there is a 1923 recording of a karagiozos scene, with Theodopoulos singing and narrating.

That places him in Greece near the same time – 1927 – that Michalis Patrinos is said to have first performed Misirlou in Athens. (More on the song itself in a moment.) Patrinos, under the name Mike Patrinos, recorded his version of the song, with the title My mousourlou, four years later in America.

Or maybe Theodopoulos and Patrinos were not in Athens at the same time. Discogs.org reports that Theodopoulos, also known as Haris Patrinos, cut 22 sides for the Okeh/Columbia label in Chicago between 1923 and 1930.

Or maybe they were all the same person. Patrinos means son of Patras in Greek, and the city of Patras is where Theodopoulos plied his puppetry trade.

Fittingly, as for the song Misirlou, no one knows who it first came from. According to Wikipedia: “The folk song has origins in the Eastern Mediterranean region of the Ottoman Empire, but the original author of the song is not known. There is evidence that the folk song was known to Arabic musicians, Greek rebetiko musicians and Jewish klezmer musicians by the 1920s.”

It was first recorded in the U.S. in 1927 and probably hundreds of times since, most famously by American surf rocker Dick Dale, whose version was used in the movie Pulp Fiction.

While the word Misirlou is based on a Turkish word meaning woman of Egypt, the lyrics for the 1927 version were Greek. (Greek-American Nick Roubanis is credited as composer). While his version has some Eastern influence, it is very orchestral. I prefer the version from Patrino – whoever he may be – from 1931: his tenor voice accompanied only by oud, reclaiming the eastern Mediterranean flavour.