Beach Music? 
To anyone outside the Carolinas, it could mean anything from The Beach Boys to Jimmy Buffet to Bob Marley.
Here in the Carolinas, it means something completely different.
For starters:
Its national anthem is “Sixty Minute Man,” a 50-year-old song about 60-minute sex.
 The music is a style of smooth rhythm and blues that generations of Carolinians have listened, danced and fallen in love to.
There are entire music stores (The Wax Museum in Charlotte, Judy’s House Of Oldies in North Myrtle Beach, S.C.) devoted to selling it.
 It has made small fortunes for bands virtually unknown outside a four-state region, such groups as The Fantastic Shakers, The Embers and The Chairmen of the Board.
It has been around since the ’40s. There are more than 200 clubs that revolve around the music and a dance known as the Shag. 
Beach music is virtually unknown south of Brunswick, Ga., or north of Richmond, Va., yet down here its popularity rivals that of vinegar coleslaw and Rick Flair. The Shag is the official state dance of South Carolina and is taught in public schools – and it all happened by accident. 
Spring 1948 
The war had been over for 3 years. The baby boom was on, and folks were settling in and trying to get back to life as they knew it.
The war had changed America forever. In the South, segregation and many of the old ways still held on, but young men and women from Hickory and Red Oak had been to faraway places like Copenhagen and Tangiers, seen and done things no one could even mention back in Burke County, and slowly but surely old walls were beginning to crumble …
Down in Carolina Beach, a couple of enterprising young merchant mariners had opened up a little beer joint. It wasn’t very big, certainly no different from hundreds of other hole-in-the-wall beach bars catering to returning servicemen, ne’er-do-wells, and locals out for a little fun. 
The Tijuana Inn would change the culture of the Carolinas forever.
Jim Hanna and Chicken Hicks were frustrated. They were having fun running a beer joint, but they were getting tired of the music that the local jukebox distributor was putting in their club. 
Fifty-seven years later, in the study of his Charlotte home, the 85-year-old Hanna chuckles as he remembers: “They were some lame records. It was Chicken’s idea to change the music.”
Chicken was a self-proclaimed “hepcat” who flaunted the prevailing attitudes of the day. He made frequent trips over to Seabreeze, the black section of town. He started making a list of the records that everyone was dancing to and talked Hanna into putting them on the jukebox at the T.I.
They put the hard-driving black rhythm and blues on the box. And all hell broke loose …
According to Hanna, “You couldn’t get in the place; the people just loved that music.”
They not only loved the music, but they loved the dances that went with it: the Big Apple, the Jitterbug and a dance that would one day be known as the Shag. The jukebox played non-stop; eventually, it had to be chained to the floor to keep unruly patrons from tipping it over and stealing all the money.
Hanna and Co. took some of that money, converted an old bowling alley across the street into a dance hall, and the legendary Bop City was born. 
It was Bop City where black pied piper Paul Williams and his band would parade down the segregated boardwalk and lead a crowd of more than 100 white kids back up the stairs of the club to dance the wildly popular Hucklebuck all night long.
It was Bop City were Jimmy Cavallo and his Benzedrine-fueled band would blast out the latest bop tunes and have the dancers “Jumpin’ From Six To Six.”
It was Bop City and its volatile mix of black music, white hepcats and kittens, and a variety of free-flowing spirits that got them all run out of Carolina Beach.
Jim Hanna packed his bags and headed for Florida, and the music that had rocked Carolina Beach began to move down the coast. This new “bop” music began to show up on jukeboxes all along the coast, but it found a new and permanent home around the North Myrtle Beach area. Unlike many of the other areas,
 North Myrtle was unincorporated, and therefore exempt from certain blue laws. This meant that the kids did not have to stop dancing at midnight on Saturday, and so young Carolinians like JoJo Putnam, Clarice Reaves and, of course, Chicken Hicks danced the nights away to the forbidden music that they could only listen to far from home. They no longer called it bop; it was now simply known as beach music.
Over the next couple of decades, beach music became an accepted and integral part of summer life for generations of Carolinians. Such landmarks as the Pad, the OD Pavilion and the Grand Strand ensured its permanence in the culture. By the early ’80s, some of the original shaggers and their sons and daughters had formed SOS (Society Of Stranders), and by the millennium SOS Weekend was one of the highlights of the season for North Myrtle Beach, with more than 20,000 dancers coming down for the twice-yearly event. 
There are now a couple of hundred shag clubs scattered throughout the Carolinas, Virginia and Georgia, and there are beach music radio shows in virtually every town from Norfolk to Cheraw and around the world on the Internet.

Tuesdays With Harold
Brenda Rosser has tended bar at Fat Harold’s in North Myrtle Beach for 25 years. On a rainy Tuesday night in April 2005, she simultaneously pours drinks, makes change, sings along with the music and fires a nonstop series of verbal shots at a big man wearing rectangular glasses. The object of her taunts and comments is a man she refers to as “a legend in his own mind.” His name is Harold Bessent. He is also known as Fat Harold. Harold is indeed a bigger-than-life personality, a great storyteller, a club owner, a father figure, a good drinkin’ buddy, a beach music historian and, at 72 years old, a very happy man. He loves the music, the dance and the people.
He can’t retire. 
The club is his home, the customers and employees his family. The walls of the club tell a thousand stories. They are covered with plaques, pictures, photocopied newsletters, newspaper clippings and awards. The names and faces of legendary shaggers like Shad and Brenda Alberty, Harry Driver, Jackie Mcghee and dozens of others are everywhere. Under the neon glow of beer signs and bar clocks, from the pool tables in the small front bar to the walls of the cavernous main room, there is the history of a place and its people.
Harold’s is by no means just a museum. It’s also a great club, with a huge dance floor and state-of-the-art sound. On any given night, the DJ will play everything from 50-year-old classics to the latest blues and R&B, as long as it has that relaxed Shag beat or, as Harold calls it, “the rhythm of the heart.” 
Harold’s is open year round and, along with such other legendary clubs as Ducks and The Spanish Galleon, is one of the main destinations for SOS Weekend. Over the years, the club has become a landmark. The cards and letters on the walls tell the story. People come from Memphis, London and Barnwell to dance, drink and swap lies with the man from Little River. He’s been doing this for 51 years, and swears that he will keep doing it “as long as there is a breath left in my body.”

The Town (at least six blocks or so) That Time Forgot
Harold’s club sits at the end of the Main Street corridor in North Myrtle Beach. Much like Harold’s, the rest of this small area is still the way it has been for several decades. Although big corporate hotels and national food chains are advancing daily, this little strip still has the old feel to it. There is Hoskins, a home-cooking restaurant where the menu and some of the waitresses have been around since the days of Chicken Hicks. There’s no reason to change; home cooking doesn’t get any better, anywhere.
Across the street from Hoskins is Judy’s House of Oldies. If you want to take home the music you hear in the clubs, Judy will have it. She will also sell you Shag instructional videos and beach music books and even fit you in a pair of dancing shoes for your next visit to North Myrtle.
You can buy a cup of “Cuban coffee” almost anywhere in Florida, but outside the city limits of Miami, it just doesn’t taste right.
You can buy “Carolina barbecue” all over the country, but away from Lexington, it loses something.  You can listen to beach music almost anywhere in the Carolinas, but at Fat Harold’s, surrounded by Reva, JoJo, Shad and Chicken, you don’t just hear it. You feel it. It gets inside you. It probably has the same effect on you in 2005 as it did on Jim Hannah and the late Mr. Hicks in 1948.
You begin to understand what Harold means when he taps out a beat on his ample chest and says: “When I die, my heart will be doing this.” 
                                  ***

 
Sidebar #1
Where to Find It:
Fat Harold’s
212 Main St.
North Myrtle Beach, S.C.
843.249.5779
[email protected] 

Judy’s House Of Oldies
300 Main St.
North Myrtle Beach, S.C. 29582
843.249.8649
[email protected]

Hoskins Restaurant
405 Main St. 
Myrtle Beach, SC. 
843.249.2014 
 

Sidebar #2

The Music:

The Top 3 Beach Tunes
1) Sixty Minute Man, by Billy Ward and the Dominoes
2) Ms. Grace, by The Tymes
3) Tie: Lady Soul, by The Temptations
            Brenda, by O.C. Smith
Best source of Beach Music in Charlotte:
The Wax Museum
1605 East Blvd.
Charlotte, N.C. 28203 
704.377.0700
waxmuseum.net