HE'S SO OLD HE FARTS BEACH MUSIC
"FOOLED AROUD 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, 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 contemporary 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 popular African American music of the day. These jukeboxes were frequently chained to the floor to prevent patrons from stealing the money or, more significantly, the records. While Hanna’s Tijuana Inn first provided drinking-age crowds with access to black jump blues, these anonymous beach establishments 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. The new establishment 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. Shag is 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 (the Beach Music equivalent of the Grammy; the acronym stands for “Carolina Magic Music Years”) 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. Though white audiences were rapidly developing a taste for African American R&B, the aforementioned Syracuse, New York-raised Cavallo had the only Caucasion R&B group in the Carolinas, and he decamped from North Carolina by 1950. 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.
Of course, the emergence of white bands from the Carolinas playing African American musical styles coincided with similar trends in American culture. 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 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 opening acts. His decision was motivated as much by financial as artistic concerns; he could present these young opening bands for next to no compensation, and gained popularity among 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 vocally associated the emergent black R&B sounds with vacation destinations such as Carolina and Myrtle Beach because establishments in these beach environs first made the music available for white consumption in a guilt-free environment. As Hook explains, groups like 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 participants and observers began to call “that music” “Beach Music,” a term that simultaneously referred to popular black music of the day and 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 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.”
Hook, makes an absolutely crucial distinction between openly seeking taboo African American music on one’s home turf, potentially inviting judgment and even requital, and stumbling upon it in the neon-lit beach town pleasure palaces. In Hook’s estimation, the idea that 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 devotees codified the laws of Beach Music. 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.” As African American sounds continued to develop through the 1960s, fans, disc jockeys and other listeners took on curatorial roles, ascribing the Beach Music label to songs and artists from all over the country and establishing standards with which to develop this canon.
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 Music devotees, often referred to as “diggers,” could cherry pick tunes which conformed to their own emergent 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 acceptable to white audiences 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.”
The group’s show went over well, though, and they gradually began to identify themselves as a Beach band.
African American singer Robert Lee of The Tams echoes Johnson’s bafflement over his first encounter with the terminology:
“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 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, the boundaries of African American musical and dance forms had undergone massive changes since the emergence of Beach Music. With commercially available hip-hop and b-boy-inspired dance on the rise, much of it with roots on the East Coast, the renewed popularity of Beach Music could be read as way in which Beach diggers emphasized their understanding of what truly good African American music is, 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 whitewashed 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.”
As the institutionalization of Beach Music and Shag continued, DJs emerged as the qualified purveyors of what was accepted into the Beach Music canon. As DJs replaced live bands at many events, this second golden era of Beach Music saw the decline of Beach Music groups. Contemporary 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 as 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 is important to realize that these same issues—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.