Recent Posts
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Wild Peacocks
In the late Thirties and early Forties, the Shag was performed to swing music, the jazzy sound of the big bands. As the Swing Era waned, the Shag continued to […]
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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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Red Hot Heart
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
“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
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
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
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
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 […]