In 2007, M.C. Taylor of Hiss Golden Messenger and Brendan Greaves of Paradise of Bachelors, both then MA students in Folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, embarked upon a research project about the mysterious Carolinas phenomenon of beach music for historian David Cecelski’s class The Coastal South. They conducted extensive research, recorded numerous interviews and oral histories, and published a chapbook and 2xCD mixtape, featuring beach music classics and excerpts from their field recordings, entitled He’s So Old He Farts Beach Music. Here it is, reproduced for your enjoyment.
Download Mixtape Here
Tripping the Black Fantastic: Notes from the Beach
We have all – or have we? – been to the sea, and for most of us, it’s a trip. Tramping up and down the boardwalk, barefootin’ in the sand, we feel the edge and end of things, of continents or at least land. The beach is by definition a boundary, geographically and geologically. But American tourists and locals alike have encountered the shore as a liminal social zone as well, a vacation void. Then the boardwalk may become a cultural borderlands to respect or transgress, a third space hovering between home and away, earth and water. However, “Beach Music,” a bleary term that juxtaposes two words to which many of us stake intensely personal claims of understanding and experience, does not mean what it seems. In combination, an alchemical transformation takes place, resulting in a regional definition particularly confounding to curious Californian and Northeastern ethnographers like yours truly. As a chorus of Carolinian voices patiently extrapolated upon our ignorant early impressions, we found our own interests in Beach Music narrowing toward five deeply enmeshed aspects: alterity (radical racial stereotyping and segregation); appropriation (both concrete and cultural); aesthetics (determined through a deliberate curatorial practice, and ambiguous at best to novices); affect (how the music means to its fans via an ineffable beachy feeling); and age (which bestows a certain authority, both in the vintage of songs and of community leaders.) These streams all lead to the sea, as streams do.
The “Beach” in “Beach Music” describes an imaginary space and a sentiment – something resembling nostalgia, but it’s not that simple. The scene’s annual awards show, the CAMMYS – behind the blunt rhyme with “GRAMMYS” – is an acronym for “Carolina Magic Music Years.” Magic, indeed. The “Beach” refers ostensibly to coastal North and South Carolina, designating a symbolic arena of aesthetic license (in both artistic and sensual senses) and myth-muffled “ease” (both social and somatic), but not a specific style and certainly not a set of seaside lyrical subjects. Jimmy Buffett and the Beach Boys need not apply – with a few exceptions, of course. Again, it’s not that simple. (The Tams have toured the Beach Music circuit with Buffett, a longtime Tams fan, and Beach devotees and bands often invoke the B-Boys as representatives of a Western strain, surf. The Wilsons’ supposed enthusiasm for Carolina Beach Music offers a validation of West embracing East, a Carolina absorption of the Beach Boys’ sandy California specter.)
The “Beach” in question represents an historical and historicized site of contested memory. Although the idyllic (and lily-white) legend articulates white dancers and partiers with African American musicians and r&b jukeboxes on the beaches near the border between the Carolinas, whites and blacks obviously have markedly different investments and perspectives in remembering that conjuncture. The first few classic Beach Music epochs (roughly 1947-1970) spanned Jim Crow and the Civil Rights struggle, which burned in buried counterpoise to the Beach myth in the American South. In its original use, Beach Music is essentially a white euphemism for black music, to put it politely, and yet the white Beach Music aficionados and DJs (Beachheads?) with whom we spoke seldom mentioned the concurrent political struggles of the artists who interest them. (African American bands and musicians – and Jimmy Cavallo, who is white, but an Italian from Syracuse, not a Southerner – were of course much more in touch with the politics of performance.) Since the rise of minstrelsy in the mid-19th century, whites have located a certain hipness and cultural capital in African American expressive culture, especially music and dance, so in that sense, what went down in the Carolinas was not that different from the white appropriation of African American r&b in Memphis and London slightly later, and of the lindy, jitterbug, and swing jazz in Harlem even earlier. (However, the earliest Beach Music tended to embrace the horn-heavy jump blues and doo-wop strands of popular African American music rather than the guitar blues that white Memphis rockers appropriated and highlighted with syncretic gospel and country tinges. The Beach Music community has only allowed hybrid forms to emerge relatively recently.) The beach was simply a convenient, sanctioned, and relatively guilt-free and anonymous space for Southern white youth to stumble accidentally (oops!) onto those exciting records and bands played on late-night radio, but within a like-minded crowd of other white youths, shaggin’ the night away to the piccolo.
What remains distinct – and frankly disturbing to outsiders like us – about white audiences who self-identify with Beach Music as opposed to rock, hip-hop, or even the master category of r&b and soul, is the persistent, morbid obsession with race and mortality. Listeners, shaggers, and DJs have a code for their preferences: “B & D” indicates a request for music by “black and dead” artists. This embalmed notion of a racial authenticity still pervades the scene, despite the coincident gradual erasure of blackness via a partial replacement with all-white bands and a subsequent shift in style starting in 1980. (Now Huey Lewis and Delbert McClinton can comfortably coexist with the Showmen and Sticks McGhee in a DJ set.) The automatic alterity (and invisibility) granted by death somehow buttresses, authenticates, and tames those fanged bits of blackness perceived as dangerous or unsavory to white norms, quietly disarming deceased African American artists and removing them from Beach Music’s economic equation. However, the occasional ugliness of the racialist assumptions, oppositions, and conflations endemic to Beach Music doesn’t diminish the power and beauty of the music itself, most of which is likewise situated within other various genres and curatorial models too. To a certain extent, you’re free to choose what you call it. Like so much American music vexed by scarred race relations, Beach Music involves both despicable and idealistic elements and attitudes. It’s hardly singular in that respect. But it can be hard to prize apart the songs themselves from their thick Carolina context. Indeed, it has become difficult for us to consider come of these tunes outside our Beach Music experience, even those with which we were quite familiar before we began. “Under the Boardwalk” and “Stagger Lee” have been completely and permanently recontextualized for us. Who, if anyone, owns a canon or category of music? What cultural desires – access, identification, authenticity – can a set of songs fulfill? What can Beach Music reveal about aesthetics and cultural control?
Here’s where things get more complicated. Beach Music does not contain a coherent or stable genre, a fact that several of our consultants slyly celebrate. (Our status as academics and non-Carolina natives elicited a lot of laughter and sighs; we might never understand…) Instead, it’s a slippery, constantly shifting transgenre aesthetic, often seemingly contradictory and deliberately mystified beyond a core canon of mid-tempo shuffle jump blues, rhythm and blues, doo-wop, boogie, rock and roll, Motown, and sweet soul (heavy on the harmony, light on the shouting) dating from the mid-1940’s through last week. Country boogie, gospel, and that amorphous category known as “oldies” also make appearances—DJ ‘Fessa John Hook even maintains that he invented both “cowboy shag” and “gospel shag” subgenres. Applied retroactively after its coinage in the mid to late-`60’s, the Beach Music label was once nearly synonymous with shag music, though since the 1980’s, the two categories have diffused and drifted apart. In the contemporary context, Beach Music has developed into an affective complex as much as an aesthetic complex—songs (and much more rarely, artists) are chosen for obscure criteria of feeling, ways to access emotionally (or to time-travel to) that nostalgic beach space of yore, as much as for formal elements conducive to shagging. As a result, Beach Music today seems more heavily historicized, mythologized, and aestheticized than shag music, which has become more dynamic because technical or tempo-based in definition, with 120 beats per minute as the gold standard. What lies herein leans unabashedly toward the Beach Music side of the divide. In the interest of managing scale and scope, we limited our immersive albeit brief investigation to DJs and musicians, not shaggers.
Musicians have been almost entirely disenfranchised by the ascendancy of the (white) celebrity DJ in the Beach Music community over the past twenty-five years. Bands are denied agency; DJs make the decisions, and musicians have no say as to whether they are a beach band or not. Style points, profiles, and profits apply as much to the DJ as to the record in question, which can be tempo-altered and edited, anyway. This subculture’s playlist (and guest list, both largely male, unless you’re a female shagger) can vary depending on your standing as DJ or label bigwig within the community. The very force of the DJ’s personality and personal style crown him as tastemaker, positioning him as the ultimate authority and arbiter of quality and Beach qualification. Beach Music today relies on and functions through DJ curation. It is whatever a respected DJ says it is––beach music can be almost anything, if you can convince an audience to follow you beyond B & D, a fact to which DJ Mike Lewis attests. And if a given tune doesn’t feel quite right, you can tweak it, live on turntables or a CD mixer or (more commonly now) with software at home, before heading out to the club. DJs employ tempo shifts, truncation and dilation, collage tricks, and multitrack layering of two or more tunes – mash-ups – to trademark their set and tailor it to their fans. In its contemporary DJcentric emphasis on curatorial control, audio technology, and sound-manipulative performance tactics, Beach Music resembles hip-hop or Jamaican soundsystem culture more than the historical r&b forms to which it stridently appeals. Although most Beachheads vehemently denounce and disavow hip-hop as irrelevant and amusical, it strikes us as not completely coincidental that Beach and shag DJs developed their methods in the early 1980’s, parallel to the explosion of hip-hop. Could this innovation represent a reactionary reclaiming of DJ identity and Beach Music’s cherished, even fetishized, collections of antique African American records in the face of black youths’ emergent radical restructuring of recorded music through hip-hop sampling, mixing, and rapping?
Beach Music is both populist and elitist; it’s organized by the dictates of middle-aged to elderly male white fans, DJs, and shaggers, who police the borders while allowing a certain amount of immigration. DJ Mike Lewis argues that it’s the hardest market in the country to break into, more exclusive than New York dance club culture. Our consultants welcomed our questions and participation with a healthy dose of skepticism if not suspicion, but we are still certainly outsiders. Although a youth movement through at least three of its generations or “waves,” the community has apparently failed to recruit in great numbers past the ‘80’s wave. (The most popular accessory for balding men at this year’s SOS – Society of Stranders – beach/shag event in North Myrtle Beach was a visor with a built-in gray-spiked, carpet-thick hairpiece.) But musically, DJs have made serious attempts to reach out to new fans and to move away from B & D vampires. The appropriative aesthetic has transformed into something oddly omnivorous and finicky at once. Despite Carolina artists like Clyde McPhatter, the Five Royales, and Maurice Williams, and its strictly localized use as a term, Beach Music has never been regionally specific in selecting artists, but much broader in scope, one of the thorniest aspects for an outsider to understand. (In fact, it favors New Orleans artists to bands from the Carolinas or even soul capitals like Memphis.) DJs are constantly redefining and revising the canon, and this dynamism manifests today primarily in careful, halting expansion, not contraction, incorporating such seemingly “safe” pop crossover artists as Cher, and even Outkast and the Black-Eyed Peas. (Although, when it comes to using crossover hip-hop hits like the latter, DJs sometimes digitally excise “non-musical” rapped sections or even replace them with elements of the original sampled soul song. John Hook’s remix of Sean Kingston’s “Beautiful Girl” – a recent hit by a Jamaican-born pop-dancehall artist – replaces segments with Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me,” the sample source, resulting in a weird syncretism twice-removed from the original.)
This wide-ranging phenomenon both affirms and explodes essentialist notions of culture, appealing to Southern white experience and memory as aesthetic attributes. If almost anything can be Beach Music, then what is it we’re talking about? Is the category destined for irrelevance? Yes, it can be nasty and racially and politically regressive. But there is hope, so let’s not bury our heads in the sand just yet. Let that song play out. “Rock and roll will stand,” sang General Johnson of the Showmen (and later the Chairmen of the Board) in the 1961 Beach Music anthem “It Will Stand.” “It’ll be here forever enough”: The song has outlived its original targets (critics of African American youth music) and now poignantly applies to Beach Music fans who were just kids when it was recorded in 1961. For Johnson, “rock and roll” provides an overarching and integrated rubric for the music he makes, an eternal and inclusive expression of African American artistry. He advises against the formulaic labeling of this “free-flowing” music: “Don’t you nickname it, don’t nickname it, you might as well claim it.” And yet “some folks don’t understand it”—maybe that’s why the leaky “Beach Music” container exists. But with the community’s increasing embrace of new musical forms and perhaps some younger recruits, hopefully the racist overtones of the history will wash away with the coming tide. “Forgive them for they know not what they’re doin’”…
“I Know It’s Hard But It’s Fair”: A Methodological Disclaimer
Our project, the record you’re listening to, is in fact itself an appropriation of a beach music product. The cheaply-produced compilation album/mixtape of dubious audio fidelity and legality has since the early 1980’s largely determined the beach/shag aesthetic, providing a kind of audience and dancer-friendly crossroads between the often opposing ideas of (generally white) DJs and (generally African American) musicians. Our compilation record loads this characteristic curated form(at) with a range of readings from our interview sources and research. Selections are annotated not only by the authors, but by interview transcripts and audio clips of both interviews and field recordings. We wanted to examine this slippery genre, lifestyle, and style through the lens and voices of our consultants and the wildly heterogeneous music itself, with an emphasis on the various interpretations provided by DJs vs. musicians. The goal is neither celebration nor evisceration nor even criticism exactly, but rather absorption and emic presentation of our (obviously incomplete) work.
We have come to consider Beach Music as an affective and collective accumulation, a series of at least three generations of personal and crowd curations, definitions and re-definitions, and articulations and re-articulations. As such, we offer here our own curatorial effort, based on our own limited experiences over the course of a few months of intensive fieldwork. By no means do we claim that this compilation is authoritative or complete; rather it reflects our own unfolding understanding of the simultaneous rigidity and malleability of beach music aesthetics, as well as our own personal tastes. It is entirely subjective and partial. Certain selections come directly from the canon—“Stay,” “You Better Move On,” “I Love Beach Music”––but there are also glaring omissions, like “Sixty-Minute Man,” “Miss Grace,” “Under the Boardwalk,” and “Give Me Just a Little More Time,” tunes that you can hear on hundreds of other beachy mixtapes. We used the songs that spoke to us, and about which our consultants spoke. Moreover, in keeping with the scene’s curatorial prerogative, we have unabashedly shoehorned some of our own surprise picks into the mix.
The same disclaimer applies to the included interview clips. Although hopefully they self-reflexively reveal our own neophyte status and initial cluelessness, obviously we have chosen clips according to dramatic effect (or even shock value), flow, clarity, brevity, humor, and occasionally horror. For each chosen soundbyte or story, we rejected hundreds of others. The complete interview recordings, even those that didn’t make the final cut, are available to the general public at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill’s Southern Historical Collection. Clips appear here sewn to songs, decontextualized and edited, and although we have attempted to preserve each speaker’s intention and message, we must acknowledge our own manipulation, our clumsy fingerprints and sticky fingers. We don’t pretend that our audio-editing methods are too far removed from those of the great Beach Music DJs.
B. Greaves
M.C. Taylor
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, December 2007
Thanks to our consultants:
Jimmy Cavallo: Syracuse-born saxman, singer, star of Alan Freed’s Rock Rock Rock, the first white artist ever to play the Apollo, and all-around hero and elder statesman of American music. Likely the man who invented (white) rock and roll (and accidentally, Beach Music) in 1947 while breezing through North Carolina in pursuit of a girl, long before Bill Haley, Sun Records, and that Elvis character. Now that you’ve heard of him, buy his records.
Marion Carter: Owner of Ripete Records, renowned Beach Music label based in Columbia, South Carolina. Ripete’s releases feature great tunes, and their kitschy album art epitomizes that breezy Beach Music aesthetic.
John Hook: Leading Beach Music and shag historian, theorist, author, DJ, and sage. Self-proclaimed inventor of “cowboy shag” and “gospel shag.” This project would have been impossible without his expert guidance.
General Normal Johnson, Ken Knox, and Danny Woods: Johnson is the Grammy-winning lead singer and songwriter of the Showmen and the Chairmen of the Board, both Beach Music legends. He’s written for Clarence Carter, recorded with Joey Ramone, and he’s responsible for some of the most enduring Beach Music classics, including “39-21-40-Shape,” “It Will Stand,” “Give Me Just a Little More Time,” and “Carolina Girls.” Knox and Woods are the other surviving Chairmen, gentlemen both.
Mike Lewis: Perhaps the premier Beach Music and shag DJ of the 1980’s and 90’s. Credited with playing that Delbert McClinton cut (“A Mess of Blues”) in 1980 and changing everything.
Charles and Lil’ Redd Pope: Members of the Beach Music stalwarts and Hall of Famers the Tams. Charles is the brother of deceased Tams lead singer Joe Pope, and Lil’ Redd is Charles’ son. Atlanta natives and residents, they recorded their first single, “Untie Me,” at Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals in 1962 and haven’t stopped since.
Robert Lee Smith: Original bass voice of the Tams; today he performs as R.L. Smith and His Original Tams, after a court decision split the group in two. An absolute dynamo live, and a nice guy too. That’s him on “What Kind of Fool (Do You Think I Am?).”
Bobby Tomlinson: Original bandleader and drummer of Raleigh’s the Embers, one of the best-known and most beloved white Beach Music acts. He’s full of stories about the hundreds of artists the Embers have backed up over the years. Once he ate Dennis’ birthday cake with the Beach Boys and drove around Raleigh with Carl listening to 45s on a portable record player.
Track Notes
CD 1:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
1. “He’s So Old He Farts Beach Music!” [Entering the Embers tour bus at the Muscadine Festival in Kenansville, NC, 9/29/07]
2. “The Honeydripper, Part One” [excerpt] by Joe Liggins and The Honeydrippers (1945)
questions by Brendan and Mike, laugh by ‘Fessa John Hook, answer by Marion Carter
The obscure groove of this song really makes it shine, in my opinion. Perhaps it has to with the peculiar beat emphasis in Liggins’ introductory piano work; it isn’t until almost the one-minute mark that it’s made clear where the drums are going to come in. That’s always a nice touch. “The Honeydripper” sold over two million copies was reportedly bootlegged by the Mob for their jukeboxes.
I’ve got a weak spot for any theme song named after the performer or band, particularly when both are this dirty-sounding. Apparently I’m not alone—this one topped the U.S. “Race Records” charts for 18 months, from Sept. 1945 through Jan. 1946. In other news, there’s an upcoming (and unrelated) John Sayles film called Honeydripper, starring Mr. Danny Glover.
3. “Down the Road Apiece” by Amos Milburn (1947)
“Say boy, where you goin’ when I saw you goin’ down the street the other night?
I wasn’t goin’ nowhere, I’d been where I was goin’.
You know, I’d sure like to latch onto some of that good boogie-woogie tonight.
You mean some of that fat boogie?
That’s what I mean.
Well that’s what I mean.”
Is this an interior dialogue, or is Amos playing two separate parts? I like thinking of him talking to himself as he wanders down the road to the party.
That chord suspension at 1:52 and subsequent heavenly resolution at 2:06 is better than chicken-fried bacon grease.
4. “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee” by Sticks McGhee (1947)
commentary by ‘Fessa John Hook
Later reconstituted, arguably less effectively, by Jim Dickinson as “Wine.” He omitted the crucial ‘motherfucker’ euphemism. I agree with Sticks (Brownie’s brother) on every count here except that “when you buy sherry…you’re doing things smart.”
No one shouts “Hoy Hoy” anymore, but it was a vocal fad in the late 1940’s. Drinkin’ wine, however, has never gone out of style—and the sweet, cheap wines Sticks lists are still popular in the Carolinas, as we discovered at the Muscadine Festival.
5. “I Ain’t Drunk” by Lonnie the Cat (1950?)
A continuation of our boozing theme (“I don’t care what the people thinkin’”):
“I ain’t drunk, I’m just drinkin’
Aw no, honey, I ain’t high at all!”
I don’t know much about Lonnie. But I do know that Michael Hurley really digs this, the tune and the sentiment. Who can blame him?
6. “You Better Leave Married Women Alone” by Jimmy Cavallo (1951)
Commentary by Jimmy Cavallo
Good advice. Jimmy Cavallo penned this tune, the B side to the “Rock This Joint” 45, by many accounts the first (white) rock and roll platter ever recorded, before Bill Haley and all that Memphis mess too. (Elvis who?) The furious gale force of that honking sax solo is hard to resist.
7. “Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean” by Ruth Brown (1953)
Female artists are sadly marginalized in the Beach Music canon and scene – “what’s the matter with this man?” indeed – but we had to include this one. The adorable squeak she lets out at the end of each line manages to telegraph toughness and desperation simultaneously. Brown was one of the singers a young Jimmy Cavallo checked out in the “Sepia Collection” of record stores.
8. “I Want My Fanny Brown” by Wynonie Harris (1948)
commentary by Jimmy Cavallo
Anybody here seen Miss Fanny Brown?
Well, has anybody here seen Miss Fanny Brown?
She ain’t so good looking but she lays that lovin’ down.
Roy Brown recorded it earlier, but this number has always been associated with Wynonie and later with Jimmy Cavallo too.
Harris here contributes a significant lyric to the Ugly Woman Song Canon that ultimately culminated with Jimmy Soul’s 1963 tune “If You Wanna Be Happy,” which advises, “If you wanna be happy for the rest of your life/Never make a pretty woman your wife/So from my personal point of view/Get an ugly girl to marry you.” Jefferson Currie is an outspoken fan of this song.
9. “I’m Shakin’” by Little Willie John (1959)
commentary by Jimmy Cavallo
“I’m noyvess.” This song never fails to raise “chill bumps” (as Arthur Alexander might say). There’s something about the way Willie’s singing works against the horn lines and drum fills that is just unrepentantly, gloriously funky, and more than a little ominous in light of what became of him.
Somehow spooky and sexy at once, “I’m Shakin’” never fails to get the ladies dancing. This might be my girlfriend Samantha’s favorite song of all time. If I played it on loop she would shake it until she collapsed.
10. “I Got Loaded” by Lil Bob and The Lollipops (1966)
commentary by ‘Fessa John Hook
The roads through Beach Music often point towards Louisiana- specifically New Orleans and Lafayette. Lil Bob’s “I Got Loaded,” in my opinion, is one of the great song celebrations of inebriation. If you listen closely, you can hear the squeak of the kick-drum pedal, which is one of the most beautiful sounds in the world as well as the bane of most recording engineers’ existences.
In Shane Bernard’s book Swamp Pop: Cajun and Creole Rhythm and Blues, Lil Bob recalls that, “In ’57 a guy by the name of Gabriel King, he was my lead tenor man in the band…He kissed a white woman in the back of the Rendezvous Club [in Ville Platte] and they gave him one year [in jail]. Well, the woman loved him, he loved her, none of them was married and he kissed her and somebody spotted it and went to court. And we went to court, man, the courthouse was on fire. Man, they was hollering ‘Hang him! Hang him! Hang him! Hang him!’ And he was sitting there just as cool- and they gave him a year, just for kissing.”
11. “A Quiet Place” by Garnett Mimms & the Enchanters (1964)
Coming up in Philly during the reign of Solomon Burke, the King of Rock ‘n’ Soul, Mimms’ sound staked out a quiet place in comparison, although both artists drew heavily from their gospel roots. Janet Joplin was enchanted with Garnett – she covered both “Cry Baby” and “My Baby,” catapulting her caterwauling versions past Mimms’ modest successes. Mimms found Jesus and retired from the music business in the late 1970’s, just as Beach Music started to dry up. The million-dollar questions: who and where is Johnny Dollar?
12. “It Will Stand” by The Showmen (1961)
commentary by General Norman Johnson
Johnson claims that, despite the numerous awards (including a Grammy) and widespread success he’s achieved over the course of his career, this is the most important song he ever wrote.
A natural anthem, “It Will Stand” eventually became so associated with the scene, they named a Beach Music magazine after it.
13. “39-21-40-Shape” by The Showmen (1961)
commentary by General Norman Johnson
Imagine, if you will, what that shape would look like. Consider the beautiful, sobbing hitch in General Johnson’s voice. Curiously, the song has consistently been mislabeled as “39-21-46,” an even more preposterous shape—General Johnson thinks this was a deliberate marketing decision on the part of the label.
Definitely on my short list of the most perfect pop songs ever written.
14. “You’re the Boss” by Jimmy Ricks and LaVern Baker (1961)
commentary by Bobby Tomlinson
Jimmy Ricks started out with the Ravens back in the late 1940’s, and he eventually joined the Count Basie Orchestra. None of which explains the spookiness of this song. Sounds like a haunted Tin Pan Alley.
15. “Stay” by the Zodiacs (1960)
Charles and Lil’ Redd Pope of the Tams told me that when they were starting out on the Carolina Beach Music circuit in the early 1960’s, folks warned them that this was “Maurice Williams country.” Williams was born in Lancaster, SC in 1938; he wrote the short and sweet “Stay” in 1953, at age 15. Remember Dirty Dancing? Yeah, me too.
16. “You Lied To Your Daddy” by The Tams (1964)
Joe Pope, original lead singer of The Tams, has a voice that makes you check your speakers for tears.
They used flute riffs on a few of their early hits, and it always worked.
17. “What Kind of Fool (Do You Think I Am)?” by R.L. Smith & His Original Tams (2007) [live at the Muscadine Festival]
commentary by Robert Lee Smith
If I did it then, I can do it now!
You gonna give me one more chance?
GOT TO!
18. “Have Mercy” by Don Covay (1964)
commentary by Robert Lee Smith
Rumor has it that an uncredited session man named Jimi Hendrix played on this track. Covay was a great guitarist himself, but Hendrix’s spectral presence might explain that burnished and bell-like guitar tone. The Rolling Stones covered “Have Mercy,” and you can tell that Mick was trying to emulate Covay’s swaggering croon from the get. (Speaking of Jagger, Bobby Tomlinson tells us that he was a real asshole. The Embers opened for the Stones in 1972—whoa!—and when introduced, Mick just stared at Bobby’s outstretched hand and walked away without a word or even a nod of recognition.)
19. “Lipstick Traces” by Benny Spellman (1962)
commentary by Bobby Tomlinson
Greil Marcus borrowed this title for his 1989 book, subtitled “A Secret History of the Twentieth Century.” Here’s some more secret history: if “Lipstick Traces” sounds suspiciously like Ernie K-Doe’s 1961 hit “Mother-in-Law,” that’s no coincidence. Fellow New Orleans musician Benny Spellman sang bass in dialogue with K-Doe’s familial (and familiar) plaint about his wife’s awful mama.
20. “Te-Ta-Te-Ta-Ta” by Ernie K-Doe (1962?)
Speaking of Ernie K-Doe, here’s the man himself, offering a contagiously creaky nonsense chorus. His girl likes to cha-cha-cha – who doesn’t? – but what’s up with that stutter?
I hung out with Ernie’s widow Miss Antoinette last year at the Ernie K-Doe Mother-in-Law Lounge in New Orleans. Guitar Lightning was there too. We drank Budweiser and rapped about the flood, the police, and the life-size statue of her husband, the self-proclaimed “Emperor of the Universe.”
21. “Shotgun Wedding” by Roy-C (1965)
Jefferson Currie tells us that Roy-C is big with the Haliwa-Saponi community in North Carolina. Almost all his material concerns some form of cheating—sometimes he’s the one doing the cheating, but usually he’s finding creative ways to punish the various men he finds in bed with his wife. My friend Otto used to work at a record store in Rochester, and he spoke to Roy himself on the phone about distribution on a regular basis. Sounds like a real character.
22. “Thank You John” by Willie Tee (1965)
commentary by Mike Lewis and ‘Fessa John Hook
I want to thank you John
For being a good popcorn
You done proved yourself to me
You’re as jive as you can be
Willie boldly struts his way through a harsh tale of punking and pimping. He went on to virtually invent the Mardi Gras Indian funk movement with The Wild Magnolias in the 1970s. When I wrote to him in early September, begging pardon for the email inbox intrusion and asking to interview him, his daughter replied, “No intrusion. Mike, my Dad passed away this morning at about 3 AM.”
23. “Talking About My Baby” by the Impressions (1964)
A classic. Bobby Tomlinson laughs about the days the Embers played with the Impressions early on. Back then Curtis Mayfield didn’t even sing—he was just “the fuckin’ guitar player.” But what a guitar player.
24. “Fat Boy” by Billy Stewart (1962)
commentary by Bobby Tomlinson, from Muscadine Festival field recordings
Baby, here I am
You say, “fat boy!”
That’s me.
I love that opening organ figure and how the guitar mimics and replaces its stutter. “Fat Boy” was actually Billy Stewart’s nickname. He was a big-boned guy.
25. “I Know It’s Hard But It’s Fair” by the Five Royales (1959)
Hailing from Winston-Salem, NC, the Five Royales were an important group in the transition from r&b and doo-wop to rock and soul. In keeping with their regal band name, the cover of their self-titled King LP depicts the Royales’ heads superimposed on chess pieces on a board.
CD 2:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
1. “I Know It’s Hard But It’s Fair” by Mike Taylor of the Holiday Band (2007) [live at the Ripete Records Sampler at Duck’s, North Myrtle Beach, SOS]
commentary by General Norman Johnson and Mike Lewis
When Brendan, Samantha, Abby, and I walked into Duck’s during S.O.S., I almost immediately heard the MC talking about “my good friend Mike Taylor.” I was confused, so I went over and did my first Jello shot.
This is an example of the popular and emergent Beach Music karaoke format at its most depressing and glorious. It’s also another example of how stupid and unreliable the CD format is. The emcee is DJ Mike Lewis. “I know it’s hard to grow hair!”
2. “Barefootin’” by Robert Parker (1966)
I heard this song for the first time while driving down Ocean Drive in North Myrtle Beach at sunset, and thought it was the greatest thing I’d ever heard. Robert Parker, where are you?
3. “Money Honey” by the Drifters (1953)
Commentary by Gen. Johnson
I love Elvis as much as the next guy (and maybe more), but his version has nothing on this’un. Clyde McPhatter came from Northside Creedmoor, NC, of all places.
In a related financial anecdote, General Johnson told us when Sam Cooke switched from sacred to secular worlds, “a lot of people thought he was going to get struck be lightning. Instead he got struck by money!”
4. “Motha Goose Breaks Loose” by the Mighty Hannibal (1960)
Fierce and weird. A pimp and an eccentric performer fond of donning a turban, Hannibal knew everybody in the early soul world. The drummer really tears it up on the breaks.
5. “Think Twice (X Version)” by Jackie Wilson and LaVern Baker (1965)
commentary by Bobby Tomlinson
Who knew Jackie Wilson could get so nasty? I get the distinct feeling that LaVern is egging him on here, since she gets the raunchiest lines. Hearing them giggle is priceless. This song makes me blush.
6. “You Better Move On” by Arthur Alexander (1961)
commentary by Mike Lewis
One of the first hits out of Fame studios in Muscle Shoals. As far as I’m concerned, singer and songwriter Arthur Alexander could do no wrong. He never blew up, but every single was masterful, a faceted gem. This one, his first hit, is particularly heartbreaking.
7. “Kidnapper” by Jewell and the Rubies (1963)
commentary by John Hook
On the subject of gems, this Jewell and the Rubies single is the only love song I know that implicates a hostage situation, extortion, and the FBI.
8. “Stagger Lee” by the Youngbloods (1971)
Of all the hundreds of versions of the badman ballad “Stagger Lee” aka “Stagolee” aka “Stackalee”—possibly descended from an African American toast about a St. Louis pimp with a magical white Stetson—this remains one of my favorites. (Versions by Mississippi John Hurt, Lloyd Price, and Terry Melcher fall close behind.) Sometimes the story involves Stack’s gal Stack o’ Dollars, and sometimes the Devil ends up evicting Mr. Lee from hell from raising too much – or even sodomizing old Lucifer himself.
The sanitized version is in the repertoire of every beach band worth its salt. At the Muscadine Festival, the Embers, Country Roads, and the Tams all did it.
9. “She Shot a Hole In My Soul” by Clifford Curry (1967)
Huey Lewis, apparently, is a big fan of Clifford Curry. As am I. A hell of a title for a tune.
10. “Bad Is Bad” by Huey Lewis and The News (1983)
commentary by John Hook
During my childhood, many a drive was spent in my dad’s white ’87 Thunderbird listening to Huey Lewis. Initially, I was thrilled about the chance to recontextualize Huey’s music into something a little cooler. Whether Beach Music is cooler is debatable.
11. “A Mess of Blues” by Delbert McClinton (1976)
commentary by John Hook
I’ve been drinking since last Sunday
I ain’t ate a thing all day
Every day’s Blue Monday
Since you been gone away
McClinton played harmonica on the Bruce Channel hit 1962 “Hey! Baby,” another Beach Music biggie. Then things got messy.
12. “Swoop Down Jesus” by The Southern Knights (featuring Bill Pinkney)(date?)
A selection from the Gospel Shag movement pioneered by DJs John Hook and Mike Lewis. Ironically, this is Bill Pinkney’s only appearance on “He’s So Old He Farts Beach Music,” and it sounds like he performed his parts laying down.
13. “I Love Beach Music” by The Embers (1979)
commentary by Bobby Tomlinson
Over the course of this research, this song went from a nauseating, maudlin piece of trash to my mantra. It’s also the one song that my wife Abby absolutely forbids me from singing around the house.
14. “Right Arm For Your Love” by Z.Z. Hill
Bop-doo-wop
Baby I’d chop
Off my right arm for your love
How can you argue with that couplet?
15. “Myrtle Beach Days” by the Fantastic Shakers (1980)
commentary by John Hook
And I was thinking today
Those good times last year
Looking at the ladies
And drinking cold draft beer
Deeply depressing Northern Parrothead nostalgic schlock, but I can’t get it out of my head. Picture Myrtle Beach as an island unto itself…
16. “Sweet Edie-D” by Terry Callier (1972)
Oh well I fell off of Noah’s ark
I landed out in Jackson Park
I busted my g-string
I forgot what it was all a-bout
Terry Callier, an African American folkie turned soul-poet shaman, has absolutely nothing to do with Beach Music. But this song has the perfect feel; Beach Music needs Terry Callier. From his masterpiece 1972 record Occasional Rain.
17. “What You Do To Me” by Carl Wilson (1984)
commentary by John Hook
Um, don’t know about this one. The ‘Fessa really digs it. According to him, this and “Kokomo” (supposedly written, incidentally, by Terry Melcher and John Phillips during a binge) are the greatest things the Beach Boys ever did.
18. “Fooled Around and Fell in Love” by Elvin Bishop (1975)
Another addition to the canon, submitted for your approval. The rhythm’s right, tempo a little on the slow, woozy side for all y’all pro-shaggers. A beautiful late-night, muscadine wine-cooler, last chance for a slow dance kind of number. Yacht-rock, you decry? Exactly.
19. “Carolina Girls” by the Chairmen of the Board (1980)
commentary by Mike Lewis
Sweeter than candy
Hotter than heat
More precious than diamonds
Girl, you can’t be beat! Whoo!
General Norman Johnson is a genius. But let’s not fool ourselves (having fallen in love): This is not his greatest work. But it is a staple of Beach Music and shag sets, a sort of response to “California Girls,” I guess. The song makes women shag, and men swoon. And even if it conjures UNC sorority blondes in baby-blue velour track suits emblazoned with “Carolina Girls… Best in the World!”, I can still hear a sincere yearning in Johnson’s hiccupping voice when he describes those “sweet southern pearls.”
20. “Let’s Get It On” Marvin Gaye/Black-Eyed Peas Mash-up by Mike Lewis (2007)
After all the interviews, concerts, crate-digging, downloading, and writing, it’s baffling that this is where we end up. DJ Mike Lewis floats a Marvin Gaye a cappella track over a Black-Eyed Peas instrumental. The results are about all we can expect from anything involving the Black-Eyed Peas.
21. “It Ain’t the Chitlin Circuit” [Mike Lewis on the Chairmen of the Board; the Chairmen of the Board on themselves]
EXTRAS::::::::::::::::::::
“Pretty Girls Everywhere” by Arthur Alexander (1963)
Well if I make it to the beach
You know they knock me off my feet
Well if I make it to the show
And even at the rodeo
That scream, when it comes – wait for it – is everything. Down “every street and trail, y’all,” even “riding on the waves” when Arthur’s trying to cool down in the surf – beauty is ubiquitous, inescapable. A hormonal, hedonistic celebration.
“Fooled Around and Fell in Love”: Beach Music History and Myth
Despite the fact that the myriad musical and social strands that ultimately coincided to give rise to the Beach and Shag Music phenomena are hydra-headed, murky, and ambiguous, the oft told legend holds that Beach Music was born at Jim Hanna’s Tijuana Inn at Carolina Beach, North Carolina, in the spring of 1948. It was here that Hanna, a former merchant marine, first placed African American jump blues on his piccolo, or jukebox, at the behest of his friend Chicken Hicks, thereby creating a space where white listeners and dancers could engage the largely taboo black music in a space easily entered and exited, both literally and figuratively.
According to legend, Hicks was a Durham-raised ruffian with an affinity for black music and white liquor. On his nigh weekly moonshine-purchasing trips from Carolina Beach to the neighboring African American community of Seabreeze, Hicks regularly heard the current popular songs by black artists such as Joe Liggins and The Honeydrippers, Louis Jordan and His Tympani Five, Lionel Hampton, and Wynonie Harris, all progenitors of the nascent jump-blues style that was emerging out of the swing and big band traditions. After no small amount of prodding, he convinced Hanna to have the jukebox servicing company install some of this music on the Tijuana Inn’s piccolo. In a matter of days, Hanna explains, “You couldn’t get in the place. People just loved the music.”
Following Hanna’s loading of the Tijuana Inn’s piccolo with African American music, other ambitious entrepreneurs opened their own “jump joints” up and down the Carolina Beach strand within weeks. These venues were bare-bones affairs, often consisting of a tin roof, a dance floor, and, most importantly, a jukebox that, for a nickel, would play the black popular music of the day. These jukeboxes were frequently chained to the floor to prevent patrons from stealing the money or, more significantly, the records. If it was Hanna’s Tijuana Inn that first provided drinking-age crowds with access to black jump blues, it was these anonymous beach establishments that provided underage kids with a way to participate with the African American music and dance that was at once taboo and coveted.
The income from the newly thriving Tijuana Inn, in combination with his enterprising nature, provided Hanna with the resources to convert a former bowling alley across the street from the Tijuana Inn into a dance hall, which he christened Bop City. It was Bop City that served as ground zero for further Caucasian exploration of African American artists such as Paul Williams and Sticks McGhee, white artists playing black music such as Jimmy Cavallo and The Houserockers, and the burgeoning dance movement called the Shag, a couples-based dance with relatives in other swing dances such as the Lindy Hop and the Big Apple and strong emphasis on smooth, gliding technique. As CAMMY award-winning Beach Music DJ and historian ‘Fessa John Hook explains, “In the old stories, the great shaggers on the Grand Stand would wear a cashmere sweater on July 4th and dance out on the deck at the Myrtle Beach Pavilion with their sleeves rolled up, and never break a sweat. (Some dancers) could put an open beer on top of their head and do a drop spin and never spill a drop.”
Over the course of the next three years, white establishments in coastal towns such as Atlantic Beach, North Carolina, and Myrtle Beach, North Myrtle Beach, Folly Beach, and the Isle of Palms, all in South Carolina, began to play black R&B, which was quickly emerging out of the jump blues genre, on their piccolos. Despite the fact black R&B was being appropriated by white listeners and dancers at an alarming pace, aside from the aforementioned Syracuse, New York-raised Cavallo, who had decamped from North Carolina by 1950, there were no Caucasian performers of R&B. In 1954, however, a group called The Daddies (featuring a young Marshall Sehorn, who later made his fortune as Allen Toussaint’s partner in the New Orleans-based Sea Saint Studios) emerged out of Concord, North Carolina, followed in relatively quick succession by several other North Carolina-based white R&B groups such as The Jetty Jumpers, from Wilmington, The Embers, from Raleigh, and The Catalinas and The Rivieras, both hailing from Charlotte.
By the mid-50’s, African American performers, such as Little Richard and Fats Domino, were beginning to cross over from the R&B to the pop world with some regularity; between 1955 and 1957, Richard’s “Tutti Frutti,”“Long Tall Sally,” and “Good Golly Miss Molly,” and Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame” and “Blueberry Hill” all appeared on the nationally syndicated Top 40 charts. White artists like Pat Boone quickly jumped on the R&B bandwagon and produced sanitized versions of these tunes that often charted higher than the original black versions. In addition, performers such as Elvis Presley were publicly proclaiming their love for African American R&B.
In 1960, Ted Hall started the Hit Attractions booking agency in Charlotte, North Carolina. Hall had realized that there was money to be made in booking the popular black artists of the day with local white R&B groups as support. His decision was as financial is it was artistic, as he could present these young opening bands for next to no compensation, and was lionized by these groups in the process. In an even cannier business move, however, Hall began booking his stable of R&B artists, both black and white, throughout North Carolina’s college fraternity circuit. This market was an even bigger cash cow than the auditorium and armory shows that he was presenting, as overhead to present a fraternity show was low, and profits high.
According to Hook, white North Carolinian audience members at this time were vocally associating the emergent black R&B sounds with vacation destinations such as Carolina and Myrtle Beach, as it was in these beach environs that the music was first made available for white consumption in a guilt-free environment. As Hook explains, groups such as The Embers and The Catalinas “were just local groups at the time, nothing big. But they did play ‘that music- you know that black music that you could only hear down at the beach.’” By 1965, “that music” began to be referred to as “Beach Music,” a term that not only indicated the popular black music of the day, but was applied retroactively to the taboo R&B that Jim Hanna was importing to the predominantly Caucasian establishments on the strand as early as 1948.
It’s important to note that, in reality, the availability of African American R&B was more widespread than Beach Music devotees often realize. By the late-1940s, Nashville-based WLAC disc jock John R (nee Richbourg) was spinning records by black artists such as Otis Rush, Muddy Waters, and Sonny Boy Williamson, and later James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and Otis Redding. Due to WLAC’s clear channel status, the African American music that John R and his fellow DJs Gene Nobles, Hoss Allen, and Herman Grizzard were playing was available in virtually any Southern state (as well as locales far beyond the South), assuming the listener had the audacity to tune the dial to these late-night transmissions. Folklorist Glenn Hinson points out that, “Though the South was segregated at the time, there was certainly more musical crossing-over than (the Beach Music legend) would suggest. By the late 1930s in Durham, white audiences were standing on the roped-off side of warehouse performances of such bands as Count Basie and Lucky Millinder, and soon thereafter were doing the same for Louis Jordan. So, we’re not talking absolute musical segregation here, even if that’s what the ‘legend’ upholds.” In Hook’s account, an absolutely crucial distinction is made between openly seeking taboo African American music on one’s home turf, potentially inviting requital, and stumbling upon it in the neon-lit beach town pleasure palaces. In Hook’s estimation, the idea was black R&B was only available on the strand is “fallacious as can be…there were a lot of places to hear it. But the truth is most people didn’t know it, and in the South, to even think that there might be such a place and to seek it was taboo to the maximum….so most people never sought it out, but they did accidentally run into it.”
Beach Music historians such as Hook, CAMMY award-winning DJ Mike Lewis, and Ripete Records label head Marion Carter tend to mark the first golden era of Beach Music as lasting from roughly 1960 to 1969, and it was during this time that the laws of Beach Music were codified. As Carter explains, “It’s an aura or sound, a cultural kind of thing, based on ‘sweet soul’- a style of music (typified by) groups like The Temptations, The Radiants, The Four Tops. It’s a style of singing where you would never get anything like a scream or a howl like Wilson Pickett would pull off. It’s all controlled, nuanced singing. This is the root of Carolina Beach Music.”
During this era, Beach Music enthusiasts had an abundance of black R&B and newly-developing soul music to incorporate into the canon. Popularity, availability, and widespread acceptance of material coming out of Detroit, Memphis, Chicago, and Philadelphia via record labels such as Motown, Stax, Vee-Jay, Chess, and Philly Groove meant that Beach “diggers” could cherry pick tunes which conformed to Beach Music standards. Curation, always an important aspect of the Beach phenomenon, arguably came to the fore as one of its defining characteristics during this period; with African American R&B and soul plentiful, popular, and more permissible than ever, Beach Music became the filter through which devotees passed black music. Beach Music listeners, as opposed to the artists, puzzled out what was acceptable and what was not within the world of black song. Beach Music was good music.
General Norman Johnson, singer of the African American R&B group The Chairmen of the Board, recalls his initial confusion regarding the ‘Beach Music’ tag: “I came down here with a group called The Showmen, and the guy told us ‘Y’all got a couple songs down here and y’all could make some money, so we came down here and they start talking about ‘Beach Music’ and I’m thinking ‘What the hell? What is beach music?’ And we knew nothing else to do so we just did what we did.”
African American singer Robert Lee of The Tams echoes Johnson’s bafflement over his first encounter with Beach Music: “When we first got on this circuit here, they were talking about Beach Music, but we didn’t know what the hell Beach Music was. We were just doing music. And we kept doing this circuit and they kept calling us a Beach Music group, which I didn’t complain about because I made a hell of a lot of money with it. When we started in 1964, we were totally all black, every concert we played was black. Then we broke into this circuit, we started playing Myrtle Beach, and then they started calling it Beach Music…when they came and told us we got Beach Music…‘Beach Music? What the hell is this?’ But when the bus started rolling in I said, ‘Beach Music is the thing.’”
In both instances, the confusion of genre, and more specifically, the question of whether the artist or listener is the empowered arbiter and authority of standards of acceptability, is closely followed by the realization that, for African American bands that were deemed worthy by the criteria of Beach “diggers,” Beach Music could serve as a handy payday.
By the late 1960s, however, Beach Music was in decline. As Hook explains, “You had two things happening in the late 1960s. This country was going into a deep depression, psychologically. We were getting our ass kicked in Viet Nam. We were losing our young men; they were getting killed. The hippies and the yippies and the zippies were causing so damn much trouble, this country was getting ripped apart. And then, on top of that, you had an enormous number of the new generation that was really dedicated to the idea of marijuana, LSD, and these other mind-expanding drugs. And then of course there was all of the counter-culture…we had every kind of expression of counter-culture going on in this country. And the music started getting heavy.” Black and white performers alike were under pressure to conform to new standards of musical expression, and the sweet, easy, unproblematic qualities so valued in Beach Music suddenly seemed outmoded. Aside from a few shag clubs dotting the Carolina landscape, Beach Music seemed dead.
In the late 1970s, however, the genre experienced a rebirth. Although there is obviously no single explanation for the re-embrace of Beach Music among college students and middle-aged Carolinians, it is intriguing to briefly address the various social and musical landscapes that potentially spurred this re-emergence. Beginning in roughly 1975, the genre of disco music enjoyed widespread mainstream popularity in the United States. Running concurrently to this trend was the true crystallization of the “oldies” genre, a backwards-looking nostalgia movement driven, at least in part, by the staggering success of The Beach Boys “Endless Summer” compilation, a collection of the band’s early surf/hot rod/beach bunny material released in 1974. “Endless Summer” spent three years on the charts and, the fact that The Beach Boys were not technically a Beach Music band (in the East Coast sense of the term) notwithstanding, served as an acceptable alternative to the disco fare on offer. The familiar, nostalgia-evoking music of “oldies” acts such as The Beach Boys, Fats Domino, and Chuck Berry arguably made it permissible to once again engage the easygoing, unproblematic sentiments of Beach Music.
Also occurring in parallel to the evolution of “oldies” as a musical genre, and the rise of disco as the predominant popular musical form, was the advent of hip hop culture that was occurring primarily in the South Bronx borough of New York City. Hip hop, like oldies, was a reaction to disco culture, the crucial difference being that hip hop was a predominantly African American-created musical form that was drawing, both literally and figuratively, on black musical forebears to create something entirely new. According to acclaimed hip hop DJ Afrika Bambaataa, by 1979, “The Bronx wasn’t really into radio music no more. It was an anti-disco movement. Like you had a lot of new wavers and other people coming out and saying ‘Disco sucks.’ Well, the same thing with hip hop, ‘cos they was against the disco that was being played on the radio.”
By the time of disco’s demise in 1979, it could be argued that there was a redrawing of musical boundaries happening in the Carolinas in regard to African American musical and dance forms. With commercially available hip hop and b-boy inspired dance on the rise, much of it with roots on the East Coast, it could be hypothesized that the renewed popularity of Beach Music was a way in which Beach “diggers” emphasized their understanding of what truly good black music was, and challenged the appearance of hip hop culture. As Hook suggests, “If you want to turn some off some Shaggers in a hurry, play some rap. They hate it. The truth is it doesn’t speak to them. Rap is not white people music.”
At the same time that Beach Music aficionados claimed ultimate capacity for discerning acceptable black music, white R&B groups such as The Embers and The Catalinas, who were at this point wholly marketing themselves as Beach Music groups, were systematically erasing any trace of blackness from the music itself. The Embers’ anthemic 1979 hit “I Love Beach Music,” released at the dawn of Beach Music’s second golden era, could almost be seen as a manifesto for the newly sanitized genre. Despite making lyrical reference to many classic Beach songs, from Willie Tee’s “Walking Down a One Way Street” to The Showmen’s “It Will Stand,” the last 15 seconds of “I Love Beach Music” are telling. In a spoken outro, singer Craig Woolard proclaims his love for Beach Music, explaining, “I’m talking about music by The Tams, The Clovers, The Catalinas, The Embers…” as the music fades. The first two groups he mentions are African American. The last two band names left ringing in listeners’ ears are white.
The rebirth of Beach Music in the late 1970s and early 1980s was clearly marked by the systematization of Beach and Shag events, contests, organizations, and dance instruction. Hook remarks that since the first widely attended Shag contest in 1978, Beach Music in the Carolinas “has become institutionalized, and institutionalized, and institutionalized. The dance has become more institutionalized. Many aspects of Beach Music have become more institutionalized because there are awards shows where musicians, disc jockeys, songwriters, producers, they all get acknowledgment…the Society of Stranders thing was a big institutionalization…this also included the institutionalization of dance instruction.”
Coupled with this institutionalization was the emergence of the DJ as the qualified purveyor of what was accepted into the Beach Music canon, often to the detriment of Beach Music groups. During this second golden era, Beach Music DJs, led in large part by musically omnivorous jocks such as John Hook and Mike Lewis, broadened Beach Music playlists at a rapid pace. A watershed moment, as far as the legend is concerned, occurred in 1980 during the first S.O.S. (Society of Stranders) event at the fabled Fat Harold’s Beach Club on Main Street in North Myrtle Beach. It was during this event that Lewis, noticing that attendees seemed to be tired of dancing to the same old tunes, played cuts by three artists previously unheard in the Beach Music world: Delbert McClinton, Rockin’ Louie and The Mamma Jammas, and Ray Sharpe. All three were clearly inspired by the boogie and jump blues genres, and all three were white. As Hook recalls, “We heard about that immediately. (It) opened the floodgates to the possibilities of genres that had never been tapped.”
Curation and control of the Beach Music genre continues to reside largely with DJs and white audiences; with advances in disc jockey technology, such as pitch and speed control on CD players and the invention of music editing software such as Cool Edit Pro, which allows for tempo manipulation, virtually any song, including hip hop, can be transformed and recontextualized into Beach Music. Lewis recollects, “A couple of years ago, a couple of DJs were having a small meeting, and I said, ‘I can take practically anything, and making it into a hit Shag song by playing it and by telling people it’s good. If your reputation is like that, people will often follow you blindly. And they said ‘No!’ So we made a bet. I said I’m going to take something off the radio and make it into a Shag song, so there was a song on the radio I’d just heard called “Crazy” by Gnarls Barkley, it’s a hip hop record. And I said, ‘I’m gonna take that record and make it a Shag hit,’ …and they said, ‘You’re crazy, we hate that music, it’s terrible, Shaggers hate hip hop music.’ It’s been a top Shag record for a year and a half.”
He continues, “I manipulate practically every song I play. If shag dancers respect the DJ, they’ll dance to the music the way he or she plays it, because there’s the belief that ‘Mike Lewis knows more than I do.’”
While not specifically addressing the complex racial issues involved in Beach Music today, Ken Knox and General Norman Johnson of The Chairmen of the Board logically explain the contest between DJs and bands in capitalistic terms: “There are more DJs (at S.O.S.) than artists. ‘Are we gonna be lovin’ bands, if I can make four or five hundred bucks playing my records or CDs or whatever?’ But the bands fall into that trap. When it all boils down, everything boils down to what? M-O-N-E-Y. And it’s a shame, but you know, it may come back around that the bands realize what’s happening to them.”
As complicated and convoluted as Beach Music may be, it’s important to realize that these same issues- white appropriation of African American musical and dance forms and the celebration of these forms as a reaffirmation of racial stereotypes, cultural tourism and gate-keeping, curation, and the disempowerment of musical performers by DJs- are similarly present in contemporary hip hop, R&B, and soul. Beach Music, however, offers us a glimpse of a particularly popular regional phenomenon with implications that resound far beyond the bounds of the coastal towns from whence it came.
