Breaking Color Lines at the Beach

Abstract

In the decades after World War II, a subculture of beach music emerged in segregated, Jim Crw coastal resort towns in North and South Carolina, when vacationing white kids would sneak across the tracks to the nightclubs in the “colored” parts of town to listen to R&B songs from jukeboxes and deejays. A style of dance called “shagging” emerged to go with it, and those kids took it off to college, where a generation of R&B bands including The Drifters, The Coasters, “5” Royales and many others played the campus frat-house circuit. When those white kids started forming bands, too, The Embers emerged as the greatest of the latterday beach bands.