Save The Last Dance For Me

 

Save The Last Dance For Me is well in production. The manuscript has been copy edited and is undergoing production. It is expected to be in the warehouse in mid summer 2012. Here’s a great photo, Dancing At The Pad. Below are two tidbits to give you a taste of what’s coming.

***

Yearning is one powerful affliction. It’s most obvious symptom is a wistful affection for the past. In 1944, just about time the shag was to take off, Doris Day sung a song of nostalgia, “Sentimental Journey.”

That song could well have been written for Swink Laughter. He had long lamented the loss of, for want of a better word, the primitive days of the early 1950s. Some three decades after recapturing the dream, Laughter would reminisce about the old days in Carefree Times.

“Was talking with ‘Bird’ Keistler the other day, and as usual, the subject of the halcyon, golden years came up. ‘Bird’ reminded me how primitive things were at O.D. in the early ’50s. It’s really hard to conceive now.

“No air conditioning. I mean none! Except at a couple of restaurants like Zane’s and maybe Hoskin’s … Yet we wore our tailored wool flannel pants, long sleeve basket-weave shirts, and cashmere sweaters all summer long. What happened to those, brisk cool night breezes from the sea? Maybe the high-rise condos and plastic, chrome and glitter have screened them off? Oh, we had a few hot, still nights when we had to go out on the beach and sleep on a float, but normally we were very comfortable clad in our summer woolens.

“There was only one telephone that we could use on the beach as we recall and that was at McElveen’s Drug Store. And once you went past the Douglas McArthur Hotel there was a narrow two-lane dirt road to Cherry Grove Beach. In fact, there wasn’t much asphalt paving at O.D. Just Main Street from Highway 17 to the stoplight at Ocean Boulevard and from the Douglas McArthur south to the light at Crescent.

“Almost none of the guys at the beach had cars. Wheels were a rarity, indeed! There were a few fat cats with cars … Thumbing, or hitch hiking, was the only way to go. We went everywhere by thumb. Down to Spivey’s. To Charlotte. To Columbia.

“Yea, those were the days. It’s really hard to fathom just how little we had. Yet we had so much—so much love and so much fun!”

***

Like the dancers who love it, beach music today is organized and formally promoted, a far cry from Ocean Drive’s pre-legendary days when kids sneaked to hear race music.

Kids used to steal over to Whispering Pines to hear the music at Charlie’s Place. Now the music, its makers, and dancers have traveled the long road to mainstream acceptance. The race line was crossed long ago. Music built a bridge between the races, and Charlie’s Place has long been rendered obsolete. B.B. King might as well sing, “The thrill is gone” for the danger faded as race relations improved and fights with soldiers withered, then died.

But controversy lives on. Like so many aspects of the shag’s history, the music serves up an area where people differ. Some are adamant as to what beach music is; others are more flexible.

The debate today is “what is beach music?”

In the early days, no one ever heard the term “beach music.” They heard terms like “race music,” R&B, and “Chitlin Circuit” music. Gene Laughter described it as “down-home, funky, sweaty, loud, shouting, cooking, rocking, chicken-shack, gospel-inspired Negro boogie, and blues. He wasn’t referring, he said, to the “pretty, lily-white, blue-eyed, Anglo-Saxon Embers and Catalina variety of “Beach Music” with cute lyrics about the sea, sun, and suds.”

Along the beaches, wrote Laughter, “this suggestive negro music could be heard at the many white teenage dance pavilions that dotted the coast. Slowly a following of white fans developed that eventually grew into a cult, of sorts—a lifestyle!”

And he wrote about how the phrase “rock and roll” kept popping up in the lyrics of R&B tunes. This expression, he wrote, was “black jive talk for ‘making love.’ It got right down to the nitty gritty!”

And then things changed. The British Invasion brought a new kind of “rock and roll” to America. “A new generation went crazy over rock and roll,” wrote Laughter, “without ever knowing what the expression really meant. Black R&B recording artists must have split their sides in laughter when white DJs started screaming the Negro slang expression for fornicating, ‘Rock and Roll,’ over the very same air waves that had earlier banned their music because of its suggestive lyrics.”