Myrtle Beach
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Hurricane Unanimity
As Irma approaches, I offer the observation that loosing everything must be more than anyone can bear alone. Let us all be spiritual victims of hurricane destruction. Oh God of […]
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Big Apple, Little Apple
Most Southern kids who became Shaggers, had been previously influenced by a “circle” dance called the Big Apple, and its first cousin, the Little Apple. Both were fad dances that […]
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Bring Your Feet – SOS Fall Migration
SOS is September 15 – 24, 2017 at the beach this year. What do you get dancing the shag at SOS? Everybody gets what they come for. That’s my impression. I […]
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Rosy Red Magic Box
There were only a few hundred thousand jukeboxes scattered around the United States prior to World War II. In North and South Carolina they were few and far between. They […]
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Society of Stranders
Nostalgia for the Shag took root in the early Seventies. Competitive dancing rescued the art from oblivion. In 1980, an old lifeguard from Richmond, Virginia, Gene Laughter, thought he’d throw […]
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Philosophical Shaggers
The Pad was dilapidated on the day it opened in the mid-Fifties, and it stayed that way for thirty-nine summers. The interior of the place sort of fermented over the […]
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Invention
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
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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The Birth of Beach Music
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 […]