Anisa Khalifa: The soundtrack of the Carolina Coast is, well…
Unidentified Speaker: One word, awesome.
Unidentified Speaker: Best music around. For a lot of us, music is like our soul.
Anisa Khalifa: Beach music has been baked into the culture of the Carolina Coast for generations, along with the specific type of dancing that goes with it.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Alright, I'm walking down Main Street. We got the Shaggers Hall of Fame 1983. Wow. Cemented in the sidewalk forever.
Anisa Khalifa: But how did these soulful sounds become tied to the sandy shores of North and South Carolina? I'm Anisa Khalifa. This is The Broadside, where we tell stories from our home at the crossroads of the South. This week, our producer Charlie Shelton-Ormond brings us the story of beach music in the Carolinas. And how this long standing, laid back culture can shuffle into the future. All right, Charlie. Hey.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Hey, hey, hey.
Anisa Khalifa: So what made you wanna do a story about beach music?
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: So, I was talking with a friend of mine recently about beach music, and they weren't familiar with it. And they actually thought that we were talking about groups like the Beach Boys. And now, to me, beach music means soul and R&B and Motown from like, the 60s. My exposure to that was growing up in eastern North Carolina. I would go to the coast and hear people listening to this Motown and they would call it beach music. And I wanted to dig more into this, of how these Motown sounds got tied to the coast. Why is it that beach music in the Carolinas means this type of soul music?
Anisa Khalifa: Yeah, I'll be honest, Charlie, like I had never heard about this particular type of beach music either. And I grew up partially in North Carolina, been to Wilmington plenty of times. You know, those beaches are very familiar to me. Maybe I heard it as like, ambient music, but I didn't think that there was any kind of culture around it.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Yeah, I'll say, you know, it's not a guarantee whenever you step into Wilmington or go to the Carolina coast that you'll automatically hear beach music. But I think that it's likely that if you, you know, are at a restaurant or at some sort of boardwalk event, um, on the Carolina coast specifically, you know, kind of the North and South Carolina coastal border, I think it's likely that you'll hear some beach music and more importantly, see at least a couple people dancing to it as well.
And what really piqued my interest was this big festival that happens in April down in North Myrtle Beach.
Unidentified Speaker: What a great way to kick off this Spring Safari…
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: It's called Spring Safari and I wanted to go and check it out. see who goes to it, where they come from, who are they, and why they're such a fan of beach music.
Unidentified Speaker: To me, it's togetherness. It's um, fellowship. Who cares how they dance? They just have a great time.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: It's hosted by this group called SOS, and that stands for the Society of Stranders.
Anisa Khalifa: Stranders?
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Stranders, that's a reference to the Grand Strand in Myrtle Beach. It's just a strip of land along the coast there. And now Myrtle Beach is really the epicenter of beach music. You know, you'd be hard pressed to really identify another place that is revered as like, the capital of beach music. Spring Safari is kind of like the kick off parade for the beach music season in Myrtle Beach, specifically North Myrtle Beach.
Is this your first time? Is this called Spring Safari?
Unidentified Speaker: Yeah. We don't even know.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: I'm getting an education too. Yeah.
So I get there and it's a beautiful April evening. It's not Too hot yet, but people are out in their shorts and other beach attire, and I'm not the best at ballparking numbers, but there were a couple thousand people there.
Anisa Khalifa: Oh wow.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Yeah, people come out for this. And on stage was some live music, fueling all of this fun, thanks to a group called the Band of Oz.
Band of Oz Singer: Got a couple songs for the victors, these are good shag songs...
Anisa Khalifa: It sounds kind of like a mix between like a block party, a music festival, and like a beach party.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Totally, yeah.
Anisa Khalifa: The vibe that you're describing.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Yeah, absolutely. And a big thing that's a part of beach music culture is the way people dance to it. And the dancing is called shag dancing.
Unidentified Speaker: This is the shag capital of the world, and we grew up with shag.
Anisa Khalifa: So break it down for me. I've never heard beach music or seen people doing shag dancing. So what does beach music sound like and what does shag dancing look like?
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Yeah, so beach music, it's like a soulful R&B, really much a Motown kind of vibe. It's pretty mid-tempo, um, and it's pretty smooth. So bands like the Four Tops and the Drifters are groups that folks will often put into the beach music bucket.
Unidentified Speaker: If you have a party and you have young people, old people, they will always come to this, and even the young people will dance to it.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Now, let's get into shagging.
Anisa Khalifa: This is a public radio podcast, Charlie.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Yeah, we're going to keep it clean. Don't worry. Don't worry. We're going to keep it very clean. So shagging is this six step kind of loose swing dancing. And within shag dancing, there's a lot of different specializations of the dance. There is the lindy hop. There's the jitterbug. Shag dancing is this umbrella term for dancing to beach music. And. I want to actually show you this great instructional video from the 1980s that, uh, that can break it down for us.
Charlie Womble: Okay, yes. In this course, we're going to show you how to shag step by step so that you can learn at your own pace. We're going to concentrate on the basics and the fundamentals of the dance.
Jackie McGee: Well, let's get started.
Charlie Womble: Ready, begin. One and two. three and four five and six one and two it
Anisa Khalifa: Yeah, it looks fun. I don't think that I would be able to do the footwork because it looks very — I'm just so uncoordinated when it comes to dancing. I can move my upper body but when you ask me to do fancy footwork I'm just lost but it looks fun.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: It is fun um and I'm definitely, You know, I stick to the basic steps for sure. So that, in that video is Charlie Womble and Jackie McGee, and they're actually these legends around the North Myrtle Beach area. They teach lessons around North Myrtle Beach at places like Fat Harold's. Alright, let's check out Fat Harold's Beach Club. Are you ready? Do you want to go to Fat Harold's?
Anisa Khalifa: Yes, let's go to Fat Harold's.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Okay, great. For decades, it has been one of the main spots to go to if you want to do shag dancing in North Myrtle Beach. And the place was packed. And I would say that the breakdown of the folks inside were mostly older folks and definitely predominantly white folks. And that corresponded too with the crowd at Spring Safari. It is a mostly older crowd, I would say like 55 and older. And definitely the vast majority were white.
Unidentified Speaker: I've been playing it ever since 1959.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Really?
Unidentified Speaker: Yeah.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Are you from Myrtle Beach or are you
Unidentified Speaker: I'm from Charlotte.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: You're from Charlotte. And I talked to some folks who were enjoying the entertainment, um, including Carl, who lives outside of North Myrtle Beach and came into town for some shag dancing.
Carl: We gotta dance.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: And I said the crowd at Fat Harold's was overwhelmingly older and white. Carl was a bit younger, I'd say in his early 40s, and is Black. And he said to be a good shag dancer, you need one thing.
Carl: Rhythm. You have no rhythm, you're probably in the wrong dance. You gotta have some rhythm.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Have you seen people with some rhythm tonight?
Carl: Well, I just got here, so not yet. I'm quite sure they are. Well, I did, I did, I did. I went in the bathroom, looked in the mirror. I saw myself! I got rhythm, baby!
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Now, surrounded by all these people dancing, I wondered if I still had some of that rhythm in me. And I've shag danced before, but it's been a while and thankfully a shag dancer named Cheryl was generous enough to show me some of the basics again.
Cheryl: You need to start dancing.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Can you show me some moves?
Cheryl: Come on, let's go.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Alright. Just the basics.
Cheryl: Oh, you don't know how to do the basics. Alright.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Just the basics. Alright.
Cheryl: One and two, three and four. Five, six. One and two. Three and four. Five, six. One and two. Three and four. That's it. That's it. That's great.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: All right.
Anisa Khalifa: So how was it? Did you succeed? Did you get back into the groove?
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: I got back into the groove. That was a good refresher course. And you can hear in that, you kind of move to the, the beats that are in the music that you're dancing to. And knowing the basic rules is good. That's a good foundation. But the real fun comes with putting some spice on it.
John Hook: You step outside of the basic, but maintain your alignment with the rhythm. And cool stuff can happen between you and your partner.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Now, I want to introduce you to a guy named John Hook.
John Hook: The first thing that caught me was the dance.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: He's going to help us understand how beach music came to be.
John Hook: I got hooked. I couldn't dance. I suffered about that for a long, long time. Somehow, the moment I saw the shag, that door opened. And they said, John Hook. We've been expecting you. Come on in.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Right off the top, he offered some main tenets, uh, to beach music.
John Hook: Freedom, autonomy, and, and especially the carefree attitude. Those are extremely important in the constitution of the culture.
Anisa Khalifa: So he has a philosophy of beach music?
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Yes, he's absolutely a philosophical guy when it comes to beach music. So, John Hook, he's a long time beach music DJ, and he's actually a historian on the culture. He's written a couple books about beach music and the history of it. He got into beach music and shag dancing way back in the mid 1970s.
John Hook: In 75, uh, I hooked up with a guy who owned a record store in Charlotte. His name was Chris Beachley. He specialized in beach music, believe it or not. You know, that kind of, how often does that happen?
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: And he told me actually about the first time that he saw shag dancing, and he was just blown away by it.
John Hook: We were sitting at a table in a bar, late afternoon. There was a couple sitting way, way down the dance floor, way down there. And I was sitting there watching while Chris was talking to me, and all of a sudden I was like, jaw drop. He said, that's the shag. And I said, Oh my God, I've never seen white people dance sexy. I didn't know they could. And I said, I gotta have some of that.
Anisa Khalifa: So how did these white people learn how to dance like this?
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Let's take a short break and then get into why these white people got out there on the dance floor to shag.
Anisa Khalifa: So John Hook got into beach music and shag dancing in the 1970s.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Right.
Anisa Khalifa: But how far back does this subculture go?
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: It actually started in the mid to late 1940s, kind of, uh, like post World War II on the Carolina coast. So John Hook told me about a guy who was white and had a club at Carolina Beach in the mid 40s, and he started playing this kind of soul music off of a jukebox, followed by getting out there on the dance floor and showcasing the kind of dancing he'd seen in the Black community, which eventually came to be known as shag dancing.
John Hook: That's where people first saw the shag. You might say what, what was already there emerged.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Then into the 1950s, more and more white teenagers started to get exposed to shagging whenever they would go to the Carolina coast, specifically, you know, the Carolina Beach, Wilmington area, and Myrtle Beach started to become these hotspots for beach music and shag dancing.
Anisa Khalifa: But these were segregated spaces, right? Segregated white spaces. And they're listening to Black music. Is that correct?
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: That's correct. White kids were going to certain clubs on the coast, places that were playing this kind of R&B music. They were listening to it and dancing to it, even though it was seen as a taboo for them at the time.
John Hook: Said the hell with this, I'm gonna dance. I'm gonna listen to this music.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: And it being a taboo and kind of off limits for these white teenagers, hook says that made it even more enticing for them to seek it out.
John Hook: How did they get away with it? They left home. They went to the beach. They went to places, uh, hidden away, hideaway places or places where they knew that their parents and their friends from back home would not see them.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Which, you know, is surprising now, like how transgressive this music was for white kids at the time to actually listen to this, because today it sounds like kind of the most tame thing ever, right?
Anisa Khalifa: And very classic and kind of old-fashioned.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. You know, there is that, that sweeter rhythm to it. You know, this is a specific type of soul music that people are dancing to. Nevertheless, just the act of listening to it was seen as a transgression for white kids specifically at the time. But Hook says that the beach music and shag dancing wave, it really started to fizzle out in the 1970s.
John Hook: Beach music was dying in the seventies, it almost checked out. It was close. The taboo that had attracted Caucasian kids to this music and dance. The taboo was, was rapidly diminishing.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: But then, something changed in the late 70s. Beach music actually evolved and took on this new kind of identity, kind of like phase two, or maybe phase three, depending on who you ask. So, John Hook says the late 70s is when beach music became self-referential.
John Hook: It began to observe itself.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Beach music as an identifier became codified within the music with songs like the very aptly titled "I Love Beach Music" by The Embers.
John Hook: "I love beach music." Okay, there's beach music in there, but there's something else. There is an observer, I. The beach music observer is speaking.
(SOUNDBITE FROM "I LOVE BEACH MUSIC")
Unidentified Singer: I love beach music, always have and I always will.
John Hook: Music prior to '78, the beach music which we had for 35, almost 40 years, observe itself.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: And around the same time in the early 80s, groups like SOS, Society of Stranders, um, are founded as well. And simultaneously beach music is getting more airplay from DJs like John Hook on the radio.
John Hook: That's culture. That's when culture comes in. Institutionalization.
Anisa Khalifa: So it kind of leaves behind that original, like, rebelling against the parents identity and then it takes on this new identity of like, we just love this thing for itself.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Yeah, it becomes more about having a good time. And for John Hook, that is really what, in his mind, helps him identify what a beach music song is. Because you know, it started out with these R&B songs and these Motown tunes that people were dancing to when they were at the beach and it just becomes this equation for beach music. And I asked him, does that mean that, you know, sweet soul music and Motown music is all beach music? And he said, no.
John Hook: One thing is they're, they are carefree. I can play you Motown songs all day long that you cannot shag to. Is it beach music? No.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: But beach music doesn't have to be old music. It doesn't have to be R&B or soul, you know, from 60 years ago. I think it's easy to pigeonhole beach music as oldies, but John Hook strongly pushes against that.
John Hook: Nobody's attracted to it because it's old. That's why oldies is one of the worst descriptives that has ever been invented. People don't listen to that stuff because it's old. They listen to it to have a new experience right now.
Anisa Khalifa: Is anyone making beach music that isn't R&B and soul, but it still gives you, you know, you know, those same feelings and you can dance to it.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: I would say that beach music has taken on another phase now where it's kind of reverted back in some ways to the 1950s and 60s where people are shag dancing to music that is not explicitly self-referential. They're instead transposing that foundation of shag dancing onto more contemporary tunes. Now, I can't say whether, you know, these artists are making this music with shag dancing in mind, but there are shaggers who are consuming it through their shag dancing lens.
Hope: I mean, you can just about shag to anything. The new music as well, but the old music, I mean, listen to the music. You know the words. The beat.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: When I went to Spring Safari, I talked to some people who shared with me that they shag dance to different types of songs. Specifically, a woman named Hope from Winston-Salem, who said that she shag dances to country music sometimes.
Anisa Khalifa: Oh.
Hope: Keith Urban, for example. And, you know, Zach Brown, we dance. And then, you know, some of the Christian stuff we shag too.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: And for the finale for the concert, the band of Oz actually played Uptown Funk by Bruno Mars. Which is, you know, a fairly new song. And it was a hit. People loved it.
Anisa Khalifa: So it seems like beach music sounds different today than it did in the past, but has the culture gotten more diverse or is it still a predominantly white community?
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: On the whole, beach music goers seem to be predominantly white and older. which was evident at spring safari but this isn't the only avenue in which someone can tap into this coastal cultural tradition. I want to talk now about another festival that was actually happening in Myrtle Beach down the street from Spring Safari on the same weekend.
Anisa Khalifa: Oh wow.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: So Curtis Platt has been running this event for a few years now.
Curtis Platt: I've been coming back now almost 10 years to Myrtle Beach bringing what we call our Urban Dance Classic. It's bringing back that dance to our community, our younger people who don't know the history of our 60s, 70s, and 80s music and our environment.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Curtis is a native to Myrtle Beach and he talked about growing up in that area, dancing and having fun with what we have been talking about as beach music, which at the time, you know, was this soul and R&B music.
Curtis Platt: We were too young to go to clubs at night, so we'd go there on Saturday or Sunday. We could dance all day, go out on the beach and come back and dance and have fun. That was my introduction into dance and music and I started probably, probably 68, 69.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: And growing up in the late 60s and 70s, Curtis saw integration start to take shape in Myrtle Beach. As a black teenager, he started to see his friends and white teenagers begin to hang out in the same places.
Curtis Platt: And of course, the pavilion was a big open deck. We were all there, so we saw the entertainers. Things changed. We were all a part of that, you know, began to kind of hang out.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: So life took Curtis to other places outside of Myrtle Beach. And a little more than 10 years ago, he actually came back home for a family party. It was his aunt's 80th birthday.
Curtis Platt: She went to dance. And no one could swing dance with her.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: And he was disappointed, actually, with how few people knew how to dance the way he grew up with.
Curtis Platt: My joy was being able to swing dance with her. And she was 80 years old, and I was able to swing dance with her. And I realized that maintaining a culture that we have lost, many of us have lost, uh, lost track of. And that was something I wanted to bring back to Myrtle Beach.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: So dancing with his aunt inspired him to start this annual event, the Beach Urban Dance Classic. And it's a space to teach folks these old school dances to soul and R&B, you know, ones that were born within the Carolina coast's Black community. And he says, He wants it to be this link to connect different generations, you know, a way for them to bond.
Anisa Khalifa: Yeah, that's like a really beautiful story about how he was able to dance with his 80-year-old aunt the way that she loved.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Yeah, absolutely. It's a nice birthday present for her. And this event that Curtis puts on, they actually do a lot of different dances. They do variations of the salsa, they do, you know, ballroom dancing, but a main focus is this kind of beach music dancing.
Anisa Khalifa: So at this festival that Curtis Platt puts on, is he showcasing the same kind of dance that you can find at the Spring Safari? How does it compare?
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: It's similar, but it's not the same. So Curtis said white folks call it shag, and the Black community has always called it swing.
Anisa Khalifa: Oh.
Curtis Platt: What you call the shag, but we call it swing dancing. The art of the dance doesn't really change. It all derived from the lindy hop and the jitterbug. And of course the beach music, they call it the beach music, the shag, but. That's in the history books, but in the Black community, it's the swing.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: As Curtis is saying, shag dancing and swing dancing, it's all kind of coming from the same starting point, um, but there are distinctly different labels that people put on this different type of dancing.
Anisa Khalifa: So it's almost like knowing the name of the dance also tells you about the community.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: That's right. Yeah. Yeah. That showcases your connection to that specific community. But Curtis says that there isn't any sort of competition, you know, between his event and Spring Safari. He actually says that he's checked it out a couple of times and really enjoys it. Uh, he says it's more that they each have their own lane and they're showcasing really their own thing.
Curtis Platt: And that's the beauty of culture. That you have something that originates with you, something you can identify with, and then you see it and you realize, oh, that's the swing dance and the lindy hop, you know, all those things. And so it's, it's one of those things like a language.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: It's like beach music and shag dancing is like a certain dialect, like a specific kind of accent that you might have in your dancing. And then swing dancing that Curtis teaches has a different accent on its own. And in a way, you know, everybody's accent is really unique to them. And sourcing where that accent comes from just makes it even more personal for you, right? And John Hook, the beach music DJ and historian, says that that is what's so fun about it all. It's making something new that's unique to each dancer. And then, perhaps most importantly, sharing it with your partner.
John Hook: Shagging is taking care of your partner and taking care of yourself to the point that you're having an absolute best time of your life.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: So Anisa, I went into this beach music shag dancing adventure with my own preconceptions. You know, beach music is just oldies. It's kind of this saturated Motown for old white folks. But I was really proven wrong through this adventure. Um, I was introduced to something different that I wasn't exposed to before.
John Hook: But you know what people want to do? They want to do things that they see other people just enjoying the heck out of. And they go, I want some of that.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: As John Hook puts it, you know, improvisation and having a fluid kind of spirit has always been a big part of beach music's culture. And I think what beach music can look like going forward is really just dependent on people continuing to make it their own, and how they continue to redefine it for themselves.
John Hook: I was seized. I didn't go, Oh gosh look at that. I would like to preserve that. You know, pickles and jelly are made into preserves. No, that's not what fueled the culture.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: It's taking that next step, right? That, that next dance move that fuels the culture. Just, just keep on moving.
John Hook: Yeah. I want to do that.
Anisa Khalifa: So I know you go to the beach a lot. Are you going to start shag dancing every time you go?
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: I'll probably start seeking it out more when I go to the beach. Um, I don't think I'll be entering any shag dancing competitions anytime soon. And they are out there. There are plenty of competitions. Um, but I'm coming away from this with some more insight on beach music culture. And I think a couple more moves as well.
Anisa Khalifa: This was great. Thank you.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Yeah. Thanks so much, Anisa. This was a lot of fun.
Anisa Khalifa: This episode of The Broadside was produced by Charlie Shelton-Ormond and edited by Jared Walker. Our executive producer is Wilson Sayre. The Broadside is a production of WUNC North Carolina Public Radio and is part of the NPR Network. You can email us at broadside@wunc.org. If you enjoyed the show, leave us a rating, a review, or share it with a friend. I'm Anisa Khalifa. Thanks for listening, y'all. We'll be back next week.