Just for fun, Malcolm Ray “Chicken” Hicks and “Big George” Lineberry used to slip away from Carolina Beach and travel across Myrtle Grove Sound in New Hanover County, N.C., to visit the nearby community of Seabreeze, where they’d pick up some moonshine as well as some dancing tips.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, when Hicks and Lineberry were “living it up” as Carolina Beach beach bums, they were attracted to the aura emitted from 31 “jump joints” that operated in Seabreeze, a coastal African-American resort community.
“The music of Seabreeze exploded with the sounds of swing, soul and rhythm and blues (R&B),” commented journalist Jennifer Bower of Winston-Salem, N.C. “Feet pounded and shuffled across wooden dance floors.” Seabreeze became known as a “black music mecca.”
Lineberry
had a day job, working for the amusements company that serviced the jukeboxes
(also known as “piccolos”) in all the watering holes throughout the region
(both white and black). Early on, Lineberry had one playlist for the jukeboxes
in white venues and another one for the black establishments, said author Kathryn
Hedgepath of Myrtle Beach, S.C.
“As a businessman, Lineberry’s goal was to maximize income by putting the most popular records in the most jukeboxes,” she added. “When local white teenagers requested to hear the music that was on the jukeboxes in the black venues, he started putting those records in the white venues, too.”
The
catalyst for this “musical and cultural cross-pollination” was Hicks, who
assumed responsibility for selecting the R&B tunes, based mainly on their
danceability. Some of his favorite artists from that era were:
Joe Liggins & The Honeydrippers, Louis Jordan & His Tympany Five, Lionel Hampton, Wynonie Harris, Big Joe Turner, Lula Reed, Clifford Curry, B. B. King, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Junior Parker, Jimmy McCracklin, Clyde McPhatter, Bull Moose Jackson and LaVern Baker.
Tom
Poland of Columbia, S.C., said: “Chicken Hicks was an exceptional dancer.” (He
got his nickname because of his long, skinny, rubbery legs.)
He and Lineberry “changed the music whites listened to, helping bring blacks’ ‘bop’ sound to whites, and that, in part, would give rise to the ‘beach music’ sound,” Poland wrote.
Marion Carter, co-founder of Ripete Records, a beach music distribution outlet located near Bishopville, S.C., shared: “This was the devil’s music. White teenagers like myself were relegated to ‘sneaking around’ to hear the music.”
“We’d listen to WLAC (a 50,000-watt AM “superstation” in Nashville, Tenn., which blasted out R&B tunes every evening) in the car or hide a portable radio under our pillow,” Carter said. “What I have found as I’ve grown up and talked to people is there were tens of thousands of us all doing the very same thing in order to hear this music.”
“The shag dance has come to the forefront, so anything that has the correct beat (with a six-count, eight-step pattern) passes as a beach song,” Carter said. “As far as what is a pure beach song…you know it when you hear it. If you’re around it enough, you know what the feeling is. You feel it in your soul.”
The community of Seabreeze was destroyed in 1954 by Hurricane Hazel, a Category 4 storm that caused widespread coastal devastation. Seabreeze never fully recovered, but locals cling to the memories.
Bower said she was advised: “Put your ear to the ground, and you’ll no doubt hear that heavy bass beat still reverberating in the sand.”
The white-colored shaggin’ loafers worn by Chicken Hicks are exhibited at the Cape Fear Museum of History and Science in Wilmington.
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