In the Carolinas, we ‘Love Beach Music’

You know you’re listening to “Carolina Beach Music” if you hear it down to your toes…and your brain cells tell your feet to dance the night away with your partner doing the “Carolina Shag.” 

Beach music evolved from big band sounds and jitterbug jiving that transitioned to rhythm and blues (R&B) and swing dancing. Then, it was blended into the doo-wop craze…with a swirl of soul music on top. 

Out of all this emerged the first genuine beach music tune in 1951 – “Sixty Minute Man” by Billy Ward and The Dominoes, according to a posting by Stewart Tick, a noted musicologist, on “The Daily Doo-Wop” blog. 

“The new R&B music (of the 1940s) had a mid-tempo shuffle rhythm and a prominent light backbeat that were ideal for doing the shag, a then-new style of swing dance, characterized by smooth, fluid movements and often somewhat elaborate footwork,” Tick said. 

“Upper-body motion was held to minimum, and the turns and spins were slowed to an appropriate pace.” 

“‘Sixty Minute Man’ quickly became the original anthem of shaggers at the beach,” Tick said.

Kurt Lichtmann, who taught dance at Ithaca (N.Y.) College, said the shag “doesn’t bounce or hop – it glides. The shag is smooth…and really feels great with the right music.” 

College kids in the Carolinas liked to shag, reported journalist Allison Hussey, because it’s relatively “easy to keep a drink in one hand while stepping and spinning with their partners with the other.” At last...drinking songs and dancing songs melded. 

It’s important to remember: “Beach music is a lifestyle more than it is a definition of some kind of music,” said Ed Weiss, host of the syndicated beach music program “On the Beach with Charlie Brown” (his on-air name). 

Yet, in the late 1940s and early ‘50s, R&B records were hard to find outside of urban markets. 

Jerry Wexler of New York City’s Atlantic Records explained that “at some point (circa 1950), we became aware” that young people in the Carolinas were listening. “Every year in May or June, we came out with what was known as a ‘beach record,’ and it would be a hit in the pavilions – the bathing places – all through the Carolinas.” 

A few of the early hits were “Sh-Boom” by The Chords, “Searchin’” by The Coasters and “Love Is Strange” by Mickey & Sylvia. 

“The Circle” at Atlantic Beach on the Crystal Coast claims to be the birthplace of the shag. So does Atlantic Beach, S.C. 

Other locales that brag about being the cradle of the shag include Carolina Beach, near Wilmington, and Ocean Drive at North Myrtle Beach, S.C. “It’s a topic that has been twirled, pivoted and dipped to exhaustion and without resolution,” wrote Jim Schlosser of the Greensboro News & Record in 1993.

 Maybe the shag originated in the McAdoo Heights neighborhood of Greensboro, as five early shaggers who grew up there have been inducted into the Beach Shaggers National Hall of Fame. Growing up, they enjoyed dancing at the State Street Grill, the Pump Room and Pop Marshburn’s Cafe, all with jukeboxes. 

Bill Griffin, who owned the Castaways nightclub in Greensboro, said “the shag didn’t wash ashore.” 

“It started inland and spread to the beach,” Griffin told Schlosser. Griffin said the shag’s link to the surf resulted from inland shaggers congregating on the coast in the summer to “strut their stuff.” Boys and girls from ‘The Heights’ favored Carolina Beach.”