Author: Bo Bryan
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Invention
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In the old days, it was not cool to learn to Shag in public. You stood rather sheepishly in the crowd and watched the top dancers work out. You tried…
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Ode to Subtle Wildness
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A timeless moon is rising above the memory of a beach town. Beyond the town is a restless ocean, and somewhere near the water’s edge are the dance floors. The…
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Red Hot Heart
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In the Land of Shag the dance of romance goes on. Holding hands at the edge of the floor feels dangerous. The music touches you, as it did when the…
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Say Yes
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“Dancing is a vertical expression of horizontal desire,” said Robert Frost, maybe America’s most famous poet. The first time I heard that line quoted I wondered who said it first.…
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The Birth of Beach Music
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Come the summer of 2017, the Shag, the legendary dance of the South, will celebrate its 74th anniversary of conception. In June of 1943, it came to pass that Race…
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Bermuda Shorts—1968
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The best part of me lives for the rhythms of summer, in the neon glow of youth where the songs on the jukebox never change. That old gold music reminds…
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History of the Dance
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Twenty-three years ago, I wrote a book called SHAG, THE LEGENDARY DANCE OF THE SOUTH. At Christmas time, in 1995, SHAG was the hottest selling book in the Carolinas, second only to Howard Stern’s Private…
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Finding The Calm
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I lived in a cabin on the river above the Tuckaseegee Gorge, near Dillsboro, North Carolina, in the suburbs of the Great Smokies. The view from my favorite chair was…
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Ripe
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My loneliness had reached a point where I no longer acknowledged the dull pain of it in the present moment. I feared the future, if to go there meant going…