Shag Dancing

“Many dancers consider the Shag a near-religion.”

— Bo Bryan, author of Shag: The Legendary Dance of the South.

Southerners knew about Shagging long before Austin Powers came along. But Southern shagging is a little different — it is done fully clothed, on the dance floor, to a beach music beat.

“Shagging is more than a dance, it’s a lifestyle,” says Society of Stranders President Phil Sawyer of Columbia, South Carolina. “It’s a lifestyle where you think of a youth down at the beach in the summer. He has a cold beer on a warm night with a hot date and no plans for tomorrow.”

Shagging, and the lifestyle that went with it, originated 60 or 70 years ago, when young white Southerners in the Carolinas went to the beaches for fun and entertainment in the summer, vacationing or working as lifeguards by day and dancing the nights away in wood pavilions. “Dancing was practically the only source of young-adult entertainment after dark,” writes Bo Bryan, author of Shag: The Legendary Dance of the South.

While it is impossible to pinpoint the exact origins of Shag dancing, it likely sprang from the Jitterbug, a circle dance called the Big Apple and the rhythms of African American dance halls in the 1930s and ’40s, according to Bryan. Hall of Fame Shaggers like Billy Jeffers, Chicken Hicks and Big George Lineberry introduced music by Count Basie and other black musicians to white jukeboxes in the Carolinas. While their Northern counterparts got wild with the fast aerial stunts of the Jitterbug or intricate motions of Swing, Southern white teens altered the rhythm, moving to a slower, steadier beat, bodies erect, feet close to the floor in a rocking step with a pivot.

When in 1954 Hurricane Hazel demolished many of the pavilions and other buildings in Myrtle Beach — by then the unofficial Shag capital — the town built new pavilions and high-rise hotels in place of old guesthouses. By the 1970s, pavilions were holding Shag contests and dancers learned complicated mirror steps and spins to music by the Dominoes, the Drifters, the Four Tops, and the Coasters.

Then in 1980, Swink Laughter got together 500 old-time Myrtle Beachers for four days of dancing to beach music, drinking, and little sleep in the first gathering of the Society of Stranders (SOS). So deep and abiding was Carolinians love of the Shag that South Carolina State Rep. Bubber Snow, an early Shagger, introduced a bill in 1984 to make it the state dance. He wrote that South Carolinians could be proud that “their state dance, the enduring and ever-evolving Shag, is at last becoming widely recognized from coast to coast.”

While the 100 local Shag clubs that exist today are spread from coast to coast, most are still concentrated in the South. “People who do the Swing or the Lindy in the North or West dance competitively,” says SOS’s Sawyer. “Shagging is different because it’s participatory rather than highly competitive. There are some Shag contests, but Shaggers mostly meet to dance, party and have fun.” In cooperation with the Association of Carolina Shag Clubs, SOS now sponsors several major gatherings each year that attract as many as 10,000 Shaggers at a time. SOS also publishes a magazine, Carefree Times, that promotes the dance and the lifestyle that goes with it.

While partying is a key element of that Shag lifestyle, personal relationships undergird it, according to Sawyer. For the thousands of gray-haired Shaggers who danced the nights away in Myrtle Beach each summer when they were teens, and for their children who are Shagging for the first time, the dance is a tie that binds. “Shag is a dance which brings instant camaraderie,” says Sawyer. “If you Shag, and they Shag, you become instant friends for life.”