‘Carolina beach music’ emerges from ‘doo-wop’ sound

Early “doo-wop” songs from the 1950s featured a jazzed-up R&B (rhythm and blues) beat. The tunes were both fun to sing along with and dance to.

Shuffle your feet as your brain plays tunes that are among the greatest hits from The Clovers, such as “One Mint Julep,” “Nip Sip,” “Don’t Play That Song” and “Devil Or Angel.”

 

The Clovers came out of Washington, D.C., to become the most successful “doo-wop” vocal group of the 1950s. The Clovers had 21 R&B chart records during the decade, far more than any other group, according to Jay Warner, a noted music historian.

 

“That alone would have secured a place in music history,” he said, “but The Clovers also became one of the first R&B groups to cross the bridge to rock’n’roll.”

That occurred in 1959 when The Clovers recorded their biggest hit tune – “Love Potion No. 9,” written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. It scored a “double-double,” peaking at #23 on both the R&B and pop charts.

 

In the minds of Carolina beach music fans, however, The Clovers “is a lock” for the “forever beach” hall of fame.

It’s hard to separate the sound of beach music from the fancy footwork associated with shag dancing. They just go together. Two North Carolinians are featured prominently as pioneers in the beach music scene.

They are: Malcolm Ray “Chicken” Hicks of Durham and “Big George” Lineberry of Greensboro. They weren’t singers or musicians. They were dancers.

As teenagers in the early 1940s, they had taken up dancing to music that had a “different beat,” performed by African-American musicians and vocalists who had begun to penetrate urban markets.

Hicks said that the all-black swing music bands used to play twice a month at the Durham Armory, “and if at all possible, I was there. I watched the dancers and began to copy their style.” He became friends with the best dancers, and they taught him all the moves – from the “shortie George” and the “camel walk” to the “pivot.”

 

Hicks refined his dance moves around the jukebox at Skinny’s Shoeshine Parlor in Durham. In 1943, Hicks relocated to Carolina Beach in New Hanover County, below Wilmington. Summer at Carolina Beach “was like a state fair 24 hours a day, you could just about dance around the clock,” Hicks said. “There were eight ‘jump joints’ with a jukebox and dance floor and free admission, open-air and oceanfront. With all of this, what more would you want?”

By the late 1940s, Hicks had hooked up with Jim Hanna, owner of the Tijuana Inn in Carolina Beach, and shared a “business plan.” It was pretty simple: Stock the jukebox with hottest new R&B tunes.

Hicks knew the “jukebox changer.” He was Big George Lineberry, who installed records on the coin-operated machines for a local amusements company and was the mechanic who performed jukebox maintenance and repairs. Lineberry was known as a “jukebox whisperer” who could cure many “ailments” by simply injecting a “double shot” of R&B records.

Hicks boasted that he and Lineberry “got rid of Glenn Miller” in all the jukeboxes” between Carolina Beach and Myrtle Beach, S.C.

 

With great fanfare, Lineberry made it a point to “test” each new record installation with a personal spin on the dance floor, selecting one of the female tourists in town as his dance partner.

Meanwhile, Hicks continued to “perform R&B research” by making regular visits to sample the music being played on the “piccolos” (jukeboxes) in 31 African-American jump joints just a half-mile away in the community of Seabreeze.