Featured Essay: Beach Beat Classics

by Dan Chambers

I couldn’t have known that when I met my wife on November 18th, 1999, at The Pour House in Raleigh, that 20 years later I’d purchase a vinyl copy of a cassette she’d had and cherished as a young girl growing up in Eastern North Carolina, and that she’d smile. But I did, and she did.

We met in college, but grew up about 25 miles down the road from each other, and our respective childhoods were punctuated by Carolina Beach Music. For the uninitiated, Carolina Beach Music is a specific type of R&B, doo-wop, and soul popularized on AM & FM radio in the 60’s & 70’s. Its defining characteristic is that you can do the ‘shag’ to it. I myself cannot “do the shag.” I cannot dance at all, but I love that music. As kids, it was the soundtrack to picnics, pig-pickins, and social events of all kinds. It seemed like multiple oldies stations cranked out Beach Music.

In 1999, I could not have cared less about Beach Music. That November, deep in my Punk Rock Phase, my mohawk proudly flared, camo shorts & standard-issue Chuck Taylors (or Docs, or whatever) were grimy and probably had holes, and I was in way, way, over my head when I caught her eye. I had seen her two years earlier in NC State’s Brickyard, and she struck me then as the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen— and somehow that night she graciously let me con her into a game of pool.

One of my first memories of meeting her is scanning her CD collection and realizing she wasn’t just gorgeous, her music taste was impeccable. Our early dates involved punk shows and heckling open mic nights at the same bar we met at. Over the years our tastes grew to include indie, then ska, then reggae, soul, and eventually a middle-aged passionate rediscovering of our love for Carolina Beach Music, even though we’ll always be punks at heart.

Fast-forward 20 years, two cross-country moves, one child, and a global pandemic during which I decided to grow our combined record collection. I had my eye particularly on the soul and R&B classics that sounded good while I fixed dinner.

You can dice vegetables to Carolina Beach Music. Whatever is in an oily frying pan just smells better when “Give Me Just a Little More Time” by the Chairmen of the Board bops on in the background. “Summertime is Calling Me” by the Catalinas is a must-listen for anyone who’s watched those golden tans go walkin’ around. Look up the Drifters greatest hits, and just revel in it. In its day, Beach Music was *the* danceable standard from Wilmington to Myrtle Beach, in juke joints up and down the Grand Strand. It has been played at weddings and parties up and down the eastern NC coast.

I wanted a great birthday gift for her two years ago. My neighbor buddy Joe (himself no slouch when it comes to vinyl accrual & rock history) helped me score a vinyl trilogy of Beach Music gold: Beach Beat Classics, released on Ripete Records, a Myrtle Beach label. Volumes I, II, & III. I wrapped them with minimal skill.

I presented them to her, and nervously waited. I have a terrible inferiority complex when it comes to gift giving. Jennifer is great at it. Her gifts are thoughtful, rooted in the things you want but are reluctant to spend money on for yourself, or cards perfectly selected for inside jokes and knowing wisdom. For me it always feels like a last-minute affair, even when I start ahead of time. But that year, I thought maybe I hit it out of the park.

She peeled back the wrapping, and her eyes actually lit up. She calmly informed me that she’d had this very cassette as a girl, it had been one of her first cassettes, and she knew the whole thing, track-by-track. I had done it—a success.

Over the past five years as we’ve both gotten, uh, not younger, Carolina Beach Music has grown on me more and more. The tunes are great—but the production is stellar. It is of a specific place and time that won’t be replicated again, and that is its appeal.

I bought Beach Beat Classics because it’s great, and I hoped it would make her smile. But I put it on the turntable because it embodies the joy of a life spent loving the right girl–something Carolina Beach Music singers have crooned about for decades. This is music about loving life, and I have loved mine. As the Fantastic Shakers put it, I don’t care what the West Coast says, man, I love those Myrtle Beach Days.

Dan Chambers lives outside Baltimore and has worked as a union organizer for more than 20 years. Even though he is still a punk, he really recommends that you try and dig up some Carolina Beach Music. He will talk to you about Wrexham Football, the Baltimore Orioles, horror films or his family. It will probably go on longer than you’d like.

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