Shag dancing legends remembered for their contributions

One of the cutting-edge pioneers of the shag dancing transformation was Malcolm Ray “Chicken” Hicks of Durham. He was attracted to the R&B sounds that flowed outward from the African-American groups who played at the Durham Armory. 

Hicks polished his dance moves by hanging out around the jukebox at Skinny’s Shoeshine Parlor. 

Philip Gerard wrote about the early days of “Carolina Beach Music” for Our State magazine. He reminded readers: “While black and white audiences were (once) separated by law, their music was not.” It was a shared rhythm. 

Hicks served in the U.S. Coast Guard, when, by his own account, he “washed up in Carolina Beach in 1943.” 

One summer at Carolina Beach, near Wilmington, Hicks hooked up with Jim Hanna, owner of the Tijuana Inn, and shared a “business plan.” It was pretty simple: Begin to stock the jukebox with some R&B tunes. 

“I got chummy with the jukebox changers,” Hicks said. “I got rid of Glenn Miller in the Carolina Beach jukeboxes.”

 

Meanwhile, Ocean Drive in North Myrtle Beach, S.C., was another shaggin’ hot spot. A key player there was “Big George” Lineberry of Greensboro, who was a talented teenaged jukebox mechanic. Whatever ailed those record machines was cured by Big George, who gave them a “double shot” of R&B. 

Harry Driver of Dunn, N.C., was the best shag dancer that Lineberry ever saw – bar none. 

Author Tom Poland of Columbia, S.C., said Driver earned the reputation as the “Father of the Shag” while dancing at the Crystal Club, a legendary shag haunt, at White Lake, N.C., in Bladen County near Elizabethtown. 

During World War II, when German U-boats prowled coastal waters, “blackouts” forced the dancers inland. People living near the shoreline were required to turn off house lights at night and put black tape over their car headlights to avoid lighting up targets for the U-boats. 

Driver said those White Lake dances were attended by multi-racial audiences. “We loved music, we loved dancing, and that was the common bond between us.” He would later marry Dottie Turner, a shagger from Florence, S.C. 

The couple also danced their way into the shag music national hall of fame, where they are enshrined along with Malcolm Ray “Chicken” Hicks and “Big George” Lineberry. 

The shag hit songs just kept on coming throughout the decade of the 1950s and into the ‘60s, said Stewart Tick, a noted musicologist, from Virginia. 

Tick posed the question for himself: “What happened to beach music when the Beatles arrived in the United States in early 1964? Nothing really.” 

R&B music grew stronger with the infusion of the Motown sound from Detroit.

 

In the summer of 1964, “Motown’s Mary Wells had one of the biggest beach records of the era with ‘My Guy.’ The Drifters also scored big that summer with their all-time classic ‘Under the Boardwalk,’” Tick said. 

“The next year, Motown did well again with shag dancers at the shore with “My Girl” by the Temptations. “In fact, ‘My Girl’ is still probably the most successful beach record of all,” according to Tick. 

“It Will Stand” may be the quintessential beach music standard – and the tune anchors shaggin’ music firmly into mainstream rock’n’roll. It’s a song that came out in 1961 and was recorded by The Showmen. Songwriter General Norman Johnson penned the lyrics: 

It will be here for ever and ever

Ain’t gonna fade

Never, no never.

 

It swept this whole wide land

Sinking deep in the heart of man.