When beach music taught Southerners how to 'dance sexy'

The folks over at WUNC very recently published a really well-done piece about the history of Beach Music -- and how it helped teach us Southerners "how to dance sexy."

(They also somewhat concur with the Beach Music Origin Story that I, personally, subscribe to -- and professed on a recent episode of the Finest Worksongs podcast, which you can listen to here.)

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.

So one thing to keep in mind is while most people tend to think of Beach Music as a VERY WHITE attempt at enjoying Black R&B, it is -- at its essence -- a very integrated genre of music -- and should be celebrated as such.

HOWEVER, one of the most interesting parts of the WUNC piece is the "difference" that they point out between the shag dance and "swing" dance -- though they are essentially the same -- or at least VERY similar if embraced by different races.

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.

No matter what you call it, it's such an important piece of our heritage here in the Carolinas. Thanks to WUNC for honoring it. 

R.I.P. to 'Charlie Brown,' one of the Beach music greats

Five years or so ago we asked the question: "Are we losing beach music?" This genre of music is so quintessential North (and South) Carolina; for it to fade away is to lose a significant part of our cultural history.

Thankfully, for years we had the pleasure of "Charlie Brown" bringing us his beach music radio show. Sadly, Ed Weiss (his real name) passed away recently at the age of 80. From the News & Observer:

His radio show, “On The Beach,” was syndicated on about 40 stations across the Southeast, making him one of the most well-known voices in Beach music radio.

Beach music, R&B music largely recorded by Black artists, started gaining traction among young, white North Carolinians in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Because the music industry was still heavily segregated at that point, teenage Carolinians could only hear the music on jukeboxes in beach towns like Atlantic Beach and Myrtle Beach. ...

As Beach music spread, it popularized “shag dancing”— essentially a slowed-down version of the jitterbug — which is now the official popular dance of North Carolina. Weiss was inducted into the Carolina Beach Music Hall of Fame in 1996 for his contributions to the movement.

Listen, I am not someone who hangs on to the past just for the history's sake. North Carolina has changed dramatically, and the folks who have moved here have brought tremendous cultural positives from points beyond. That's a good thing. However, as a native North Carolinian, Beach music is and was a major part of my upbringing -- and for many people before and after me. Heck, my wife and I shagged at our wedding. But I do worry that more and more people do not know about Beach music and how great it is. In fact, I heard a comment recently that a local lifestyle magazine editor was given the suggestion to include something about the genre, and the response was "what the hell is Beach music?' That makes me sad. And I don't necessarily blame that person; we have clearly not kept it pertinent enough.

R.I.P. to Ed Weiss. But hopefully beach music will live for decades to come. 

2019: The Year of Music

Man, for someone who (likes to) fancy himself a chronicler and promoter of all things North Carolina, somehow it slipped past me that 2019 will be the Year of Music in the Old North State.

*Looks at calendar. Realizes that 2019 is almost halfway over.*

D'OH!

It wasn't until I saw some of my favorites -- like BJ Barham of American Aquarium and the Chatham County Line guys -- tweeting about it last night that I realized this was a thing. Apparently Mandolin Orange had a special gig at the Executive Mansion in celebration of the Year of Music.

“From bluegrass to the blues, from gospel to funk, from beach music to indie and hip hop, North Carolina is the birthplace of many musical styles and iconic performers,” Gov. Cooper said in a press release, ahem, last year. “The Year of Music celebration not only recognizes North Carolina musicians that are now cultural icons but the nearly 25,000 North Carolinians who work in music occupations.”

Even taking away the business of music, songwriting and performing here in N.C. is a BIG deal and should be celebrated, even just for the art of it. Lord knows we have a lot of which to be proud.

Here are a just a few of the music-related posts from this site from over the years:

• Dunn, N.C. and the Hall of Fame connection
• (Also, Let's Get Link Wray into the Rock HOF) 
• Nothin' could be finer
• Epperson preserved the music of the Appalachians
• Doc Watson, the face of N.C.
• A tribute to N.C.'s musical heritage
• Are we losing beach music?

“Music is universal in North Carolina, regardless of where you live in the state,” said Susi H. Hamilton, secretary for the North Carolina Department of Natural & Cultural Resources. “North Carolinians are the heroes of many musical genres in America, reflecting our rich cultural heritage, our innovative spirit and the collaborative nature of our musical communities.”

Scott McCreery: The savior of beach music?

About a year and a half ago, we discussed right here the question of, "Are we losing beach music?"  The conversation came from some discussions via social media.

As one person commented on Facebook, "My big thing is how much all this great stuff has faded into history. The new generation needs to be educated. How about we form a 'Beach Music Revival Society?' "

Well, maybe Garner's Scotty McCreery could be the Head Moose of this Club. After all, his song, "Barefootin'," is now No. 1 on the beach music charts. (Sadly, I was not aware there was even still a beach music chart!)

According to the News & Observer/Charlotte Observer, the song is top o' the charts even though it's not even a single.

But the song has picked up enough spins from reporting Association of Carolina Shag Clubs venues and deejays across the Mid-Atlantic to hit the top.

It’s a song McCreery actually co-wrote three years ago, after telling co-writer David Lee Murphy that he wanted to do a song in the supper-club-soul style of beach, complete with optimal shag tempo and horns.

Kudos to McCreery for "getting it" and showing some love for his North Carolina roots, something he talked to the paper about.

“Outside of North Carolina, Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia, people do not know about beach music,” McCreery said in a News & Observer interview earlier this year. “I’m excited to maybe put beach music on more of a national scale because it’s such a regional thing.”

“Barefootin’” will probably be in the setlist the next time McCreery performs a hometown show, Jan. 19 at the Ritz in Raleigh. But that actually won’t be his first time doing beach music on a stage.

“I used to see Band of Oz playing down at the beach,” McCreery said. “I even sang with them at Topsail Beach one night. I was in the crowd and one of their daughters brought me up. I think we did their version of ‘Wagon Wheel.’”

Read more here: https://www.charlotteobserver.com/entertainment/article217912230.html#storylink=cpy

 Listen to "Barefootin'" here:

Read more here: https://www.charlotteobserver.com/entertainment/article217912230.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: https://www.charlotteobserver.com/entertainment/article217912230.html#storylink=cpy

There's 'something eternal' about N.C. summers

I got suckered into doing one of those Facebook "7 books in 7 days" things. OK, "suckered" is probably too strong; after all, I enthusiastically dove in to it. Books are a passion of mine.

One of the books I chose to highlight is Tim McLaurin's Keeper of the Moon, which is a memoir about his own life growing up around Fayetteville. Seriously, if you haven't read it -- WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?

In reflecting on this book, I was reminded of one of my favorite passages ever from any piece of literature. And it's also so timely as we are now in the throes of summer. Yes, it's pretty much ungodly hot these days, but I appreciate that McLaurin could appreciate Carolina summers. To wit:

If indeed there exists a physical heaven, I hope it is patterned after North Carolina between the summer hours of six and eight a.m. The haunting call of doves, leaves jeweled with dew, the glint of sun in oak branches, robins and roosters in duet, fog -- something eternal exists in those minutes that a person carries in memory for life.

God, I love that so much.

This also has me reminiscing about other quintessential "Carolina Summer" things. Here are a few that we've discussed over the years here. Enjoy!

Remembering the Fort Fisher Hermit

Back when the bright lights hit the lake

Are we losing beach music?

The winds of change and the Sunset Beach bridge

Eat your heart out at the Seafood Festival

'The Lost Colony' is thriving

Back when the bright lights hit the lake

Back in high school in Harnett County, I would sometimes here my classmates talk about going to Lake Artesia. For whatever reason -- maybe I wasn't invited (thanks, guys!)? -- I never made it to Lake Artesia. I think, in my mind, I imagined it being a smaller White Lake.

Earlier this week, my mother -- a proud Sampson County native -- talked about Williams Lake and the great musical acts that would play there in the 1950s and '60s. "We would say we were going to a friend's house for the night, but we'd instead go to Williams Lake."

I just had to look up the history of these places -- hot spots that were quite literally in the middle of nowhere.

Like my mother, Michael Parker is a Clinton native. Parker has written about Williams Lake and Lake Artesia. It's pretty remarkable the acts that made the trek down these back roads to play for sometimes up to 700 rural North Carolinians back in the day. (But, to be fair, every North Carolinian was a rural North Carolinian back then.)

Williams Lake was located near Mingo Township, in the northeastern corner of Sampson County, closer to Newton Grove and Dunn than it was to Clinton ...  The club had been drawing teenagers from all over eastern North Carolina since the 1930s, when a pavilion was built on the lake and the swimmers asked the owner, Clayton Williams, to put in a jukebox for jitterbugging. After a hard day in the tobacco and produce fields, which were the primary summer jobs for teenagers back then, a night at Williams Lake was a just reward. But its heyday was in the ’60s, when the shoulders of the country roads leading to the lake were clogged with the cars of kids looking to shag to the music of The Tams, The Drifters, and Maurice Williams and The Zodiacs. ...

Lake Artesia -- or "Amnesia" -- was similar, but different.

The club itself — an A-frame flanked by two wide wings that resembled, inside and out, a rustic lodge — was a good ways off the highway, down a sandy lane dead-ending in a huge field converted into a parking lot. A booth was set up at the highway. They charged by the head. ... During the three or four summers I spent going there, the bigger-name bands — The Tams, The Drifters, Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs — seemed to regularly change members. But no one cared if this was the “original” Drifters. We just wanted to get up on the roof or under the boardwalk. We wanted to be young, be foolish, be happy. We wanted to say to the security guards who accused us of climbing into and out of someone’s dank trunk, What kind of fool do you think I am?

 Of course, Parker asks the legitimate question -- the same question any logical person would ask: Why? And how? What was it that led to these small "bodies" of water to attract national touring acts?

It’s a mystery to me now how these two lakes — one of them not much more than a pond — in the middle of the middle of nowhere, both within a half hour of my hometown, drew national talent night after summer night. There must have been money in it, despite the revenue lost to trunk and wood, but surely these bands could have made more in conventional dance clubs in Raleigh or Wilmington, Charlotte or Greensboro, places we small-town, rural kids thought of as big cities.

I’m just happy these places existed, for even though I know one of them only by the aura it left in the memories of its patrons, if it was anything like the one I knew in my teens, it was magical. A sweet drive down back roads, past tobacco barns and head-high corn in field after field as the brutal summer sun finally cast shadows and brought shade. The thrill of entry, legitimate or not. The chance of meeting someone you did not know whom you’d like to get to know better. Most of all, the music, which — after a long day cropping tobacco or packing produce or, if you were lucky enough, basking in a plastic chair overlooking squealing kids splashing about in some swimming pool — took you to the place where music takes you, which has nothing to do with parking lots or ponds. Lovelorn lyrics, tight horn sections, thumpy bass, and chugging rhythm guitar — these sounds are what turn my time there into a field of dreams.

Any first-hand stories from Williams Lake or Lake Artesia you care to share?

Are we losing beach music?

Thanks to the power of social media, some friends and I had a very nice time the other day reminiscing about beach music and the memories that those songs conjure up. Songs like "With This Ring" and "Carolina Girls" and " You're More Than A Number In My Little Red Book" and so on. Beach music is arguably the one style of music that is most synonymous with the Carolinas. The Shag dance itself, some say, originated off the Carolina Beach boardwalk.

For some of the older folks in the discussion, the conversation took them back to times shaggin' in Myrtle Beach or Atlantic Beach. For me, it was more about thinking back to the songs we listened to while spending summer evenings in my grandparents' cottage on Topsail Island and then, later, enjoying concerts at various college events featuring General Johnson and the Chairmen of Board, the Embers and even Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts. (My wife and I even learned the Shag for our wedding reception.)

But the discussion also touched on something else: is beach music dying? As one person commented on Facebook, "My big thing is how much all this great stuff has faded into history. The new generation needs to be educated. How about we form a 'Beach Music Revival Society?' "

Thankfully, through conversations like this and through events like the North Hills Beach Music Concert schedule in Raleigh, beach music continues to live on. (The N.C. State University marching band even plays "Hey Baby" in-between the third and fourth quarter of football games, which results in a stadium singalong.) Even some of those same bands continue to tour and perform. But let's do our part to keep it alive. In fact, we've created a Spotify playlist that is open; feel free to add appropriate beach music songs.

In the meantime, enjoy these oldies and (definitely still) goodies.