THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 12, 1996 TAG: 9605090178
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 20 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: John Harper
LENGTH: Medium: 64 lines
FOR THE PAST 70 years, North and South Carolina have been engaged in a civil war.
At issue: In which of the states did the ``shag'' originate?''
Bo Bryan tries to settle the issue in his new book, ``Shag: The Dance Legend.''
``I'm not trying to pass myself off as an authority of this dance,'' says Bryan, 48, of Beaufort, S.C. ``I have simply tried to place the dance in historical and cultural context, in order to discover why the Shag evolved the way it did.''
The shag, for the uninitiated, is a deceptively complex six or eight rhythm in 4/4 time. To the untrained eye, it appears to be a slowed-down jitterbug.
Black dancers in the Savoy Nightclub in New York City first did a dance resembling the modern-day shag in 1924. Later, college-age kids in New York City's Paramount Nightclub adopted as their own a faster version of the dance, and called it the ``Lindy'' or the ``Lindy hop.''
The dance, executed to the music of the swing-era bands, was named in honor of aviator Charles Lindbergh.
Bryan believes northerners brought the dance to the Carolinas in the 1940s. On hot summer nights, couples would ``shag'' to the underground rhythm and blues music in the pavilions along the coast of the Carolinas, predominately on a slim swatch of sand called ``The Grand Strand'' in Myrtle Beach.
``It probably evolved from the jitterbug,'' Bryan says. ``But because the jitterbug was so fast, it caused the girls' hoop skirts to fly over their heads. From that point on, the jitterbug had its wings clipped a little.''
The dance craze faded in the 1950s and '60s. But in the early '70s, the shag, or at least a dance resembling today's shag, was resurrected by a group of dancers in Atlantic Beach, N.C.
``They started a shag contest circuit,'' Bryan says. ``Although none of the dancers remember the word `shag' being regularly used.''
Bryan's book is full of photographs, many of them snapshots donated by some of the early shaggers.
``Will Maddox is really responsible for the photographs,'' Bryan says. ``We thought it would take six months to round up the photos. It ended up taking two years.''
A $39.95 hardback collectors' edition of the book sold out in a few months. Foundation Books of Beaufort, S.C., just released a $19.95 paperback version.
``We really hadn't seen a book written about the shag,'' says Maddox, president of Foundation Books. ``The response has been overwhelming.''
And what about the debate? North or South Carolina as the originator of the shag?
``Probably both,'' Bryan says. ``The whole concept is a combination of things.''
Bryan also answers another important question. Does he shag?
``I learned back in 1964 in Greensboro,'' he says. ``It was the only way to get a date in high school.'' ILLUSTRATION: Staff photo by DREW C. WILSON
Bo Bryan tries settling the issue in his new book, ``Shag: The Dance
Legend.''
by CNB