Recent Posts
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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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Cool Sip
The Jitterbug, like the Shag, was a social dance. It served no religious or ritualistic function. However, through its performers, the patterns of the dances reflected the overall environment of […]
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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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Now
Waking up in the dark, before the earth rotates and the sun appears to rise, I sit on the edge of a bed, facing a wall-size mirror. I position myself […]
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Pertinent Points
“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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Florentine Patio
Among the originators of the Shag was a bright-eyed kid from Florence, South Carolina, the night owl, Billy Jeffers. Billy had trouble with asthma as a kid. He grew up […]
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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 […]