Dale, Dick

Lightning-fast instrumental rock guitarist; surf music innovator in the early 1960s, and known as the "King of Surf Guitar." Born Richard Monsour (1937) in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of a Lebanese machinist, Dale as a child taught himself to play Hank Williams songs on ukulele and guitar. He began surfing as a teenager in the mid-'50s, after his family moved west to the Los Angeles County beachfront suburb of El Segundo; he was also writing instrumental country-western tunes.

In 1956, no...