Shag Book Underway—Big Apple, Carolina Beach Excerpt

An Excerpt From Chapter 6, “Crossing The Race Line”

The truth is the Big Apple and the shag itself almost didn’t come to pass, if you believe in dance evolution. (The Big Apple, as you’ll see, led to the Little Apple a predecessor of the jitterbug, a predecessor to the shag.) And New York City? Well, you might not know it as the Big Apple today. (Some discredit the city’s connection with the Big Apple dance. Fitz Gerald and other writers used the term “Big Apple” to refer to New York City in the 1920s well before the Big Apple dance craze arrived in 1937.) Not only did Jim Crow throw up a barrier for whites who enjoyed black music, indecision almost got into the mix as well. One of dance’s shrines might easily have never existed.

In Beth Shalom, Keeping Columbia’s Jewish Traditions Alive, (Palmetto Conservation Press), author Cal Harrison reveals how Fat Sam’s Apple Club might never had existed had a $900 real estate transaction been rescinded by a congregation heedful that their hallowed old house of worship might fall into scandalous hands.

The real estate in question, the House of Peace, an Eastern Orthodox style building, replaced an earlier house of worship destroyed by fire in 1915. During the 1920s and the 1930s it served as a synagogue for the House of Peace congregation. Around 1934 an expanding congregation was outpacing the synagogue’s capacity and the congregation decided to raise funds for a new synagogue. The harsh financial times no doubt delayed the building of a new synagogue. Selling the old synagogue offered one way to raise funds for the new one. Six months later, however, no firm offers had been made.

“The building was finally sold in March 1936 to H. Desportes for $900,” wrote Harrison. “Because of ‘so much unfavorable criticism’ of the sale, the board immediately voted to buy back the building, but the effort was dropped five months later when the board couldn’t come to terms with the new owner over the asking price.

“The sale turned out to be scandalous to many members of the congregation. From 1936 to 1938, the old shul was converted into the Big Apple Night Club. The oak pews were removed but the stained-glass windows remained. Neon lights in the shape of shooting stars and comets were added to the central dome and a giant red apple was painted on one of the walls.”

Young blacks congregated there doing a circle dance as old as Africa, a group dance that came to be called the Big Apple. (Whoever painted that apple created an eponymous shrine in dance history.)

Harrison continues, “A delegation of Columbia dancers traveled to New York to demonstrate it, and much to the chagrin of House of Peace members, the Big Apple dance swept the nation in 1937, making the little nightclub famous.”

Had H. Desportes resold the building back to the congregation, The Big Apple might never have happened. That would have eliminated the Little Apple. Where would the shag be today? But it happened and the key to it all was music coming from an old synagogue.

Big Apple Seeds

“On weekend nights in 1936, shouts would ring out from the old House of Prayer synagogue on Gates Street. Inside the Big Apple, as the club was known, young people would form a circle, steppin’ out to the sweaty beat, waiting for their time to ‘shine,’ as Jeff Wilkinson wrote in the August 24, 2003, Sunday edition of The State.

“The steps were ‘called’ like the square dance. The dancers would ‘swing left’ or ‘swing right’ in a circle until the ‘leaderman’ called popular steps—‘Spank Yo’ Horsey,’ ‘Piggy Back’ or ‘Scratchin’ Fleas.

“The dancing was relentless and competitive—rug cuttin’ with roots so deep it stretched all the way back to Africa. ‘It just came from inside of us,’ said Lucretia Cayruth.”

Cayruth, as Wilkinson wrote, was the last of the original Big Apple dancers.

The music must have been booming that auspicious night. As University of South Carolina students Donald Davis, Billy Spivey, and Harold “Goo-Goo” Wiles drove by Fat Sam’s nightclub, music stopped them in their tracks. They got out of the car and asked the club’s owner, Frank “Fat Sam” Boyd, for permission to enter. It was unusual for whites to go into a black club. Skip Davis, the son of Donald Davis, said, “Fat Sam made two conditions. They had to pay twenty-five cents each and they had to sit in the balcony.”

Spellbound University of South Carolina students watched blacks forming a big circle dancing. That, however, was all they could do. Feeling the sting of reverse segregation—after all old Jim Crow was watching—they paid to sit in the balcony. One can imagine how the awestruck white kids itched to hit the dance floor.

During the next few months, the white students brought more friends to watch the black dancers. Fascinated with the dance, they would toss coins to the black dancers when they ran out of money.

“We had a lot of nickels with us because it took a nickel to play a song. If the music stopped and the people on the floor didn’t have any money, we didn’t get any more dancing. We had to feed the Nickelodeon,” recalls Harold E. Ross, who often visited the club and was 18 years old at the time.

Observers gathered in the balcony. Students from Columbia High School, University High School, and the University of South Carolina would sit in the balcony and call out dance steps to the dancers below. The black dancers responded by jumping into the middle of the circle and ‘shining.’

The white kids in the balcony studied the dance moves, preparing to adopt them and try them out. As Wilkinson wrote in the August 24, 2003, Sunday edition of The State, “In the following months at USC’s fraternity and sorority houses, the dance would enter another phase. The students were anxious to show off the Big Apple, as they called it, to friends throughout the Carolinas. They looked forward to the end of school and the annual migration to the Grand Strand, anxious to ‘polish the apple’ at the Myrtle Beach Pavilion.”

Harold Ross and others, as Wilkins wrote, co-opted the Big Apple’s steps. “We always did the best we could to imitate the steps we saw,” he said. “But we called it the Little Apple. We didn’t feel like we should copy the Big Apple, so we called it that.”

The Apple-watching kids end up feeding the nation a dance craze. Summer 1937, USC students dance the Big Apple at the Pavilion in Myrtle Beach. As Wilkinson wrote, “it began in a balcony.” People talked up the dance and word reached a New York talent agent, Gay Foster.

In 1937, Foster came to Columbia to hold auditions in a club in the basement of the Jefferson Hotel, The Chatterbox. He selected young couples from South Carolina and North Carolina to go to the Roxy Theatre for a three-week engagement that began September 3, 1937. They would introduce the Big Apple dance to New York City and the world. The couples selected were Jane Crout and Donald Davis; Dottie Eden (a Roxy Chorus Girl from South Dakota) and Billy Spivey; Jean Foreman and Robin Hood; Genie Mitchell and Jack Fallaw; Dot Bradford and Harry Fowler; Maxine Martin and Blackie Lovell; Bettie Henderson and Kenneth Clarke, and Frances Fetner and Johnny Campbell.

The dance, a big hit, sold out six performances a day. Following the Roxy shows, “Billy Spivey’s Big Apple Dancers” hit the road for a six-month, cross-country tour. The Big Apple Craze arrived full force.

From little seeds do big apples grow. Life magazine featured the Big Apple in a four-page photo spread December 20, 1937, predicting that 1937 would be remembered as the year of the Big Apple. It was, bringing more vexation to the House of Peace congregation. In a bit of major irony, white dancers toured the country in 1937 and 1938 doing their rendition of a black dance. As the war years approached, the dancers remained separated as races go except for a few adventurers.

As Bryan wrote in Shag, “During the war, the only people who heard a variety of rhythm and blues were a few hipsters here and there who made a habit of jumping the Jim Crow rope.” One such fellow was Malcolm Ray “Chicken” Hicks. Dancing was in his blood, having learned to do the Little Apple from some girls up in Durham, North Carolina, when he was around 13.

Hicks grew up around blacks and it wasn’t that big a deal to him to watch blacks jitterbugging at an armory in Durham. As a teen he slipped into many a “Colored Only” show there. Watching from the balcony—Jim Crow’s payback—Hicks saw new moves and steps. Legend holds that he picked up his distinctive “camel walk” hanging around at Skinny’s Shoeshine Parlor in Durham.

As Bryan relates, Hicks became acquainted with some black men who took him to some joints in a township in Durham known as Haiti. There he came to love the blues, jazz, and gospel. When the big bands hit Durham, Hicks was in the balcony “watching for a chance to slip downstairs and boogie with the black girls” as Bryan writes.

Dancing On The North Carolina Coast

Hicks and his younger brother, Bobby, and other white boys would travel down seaside avenues to a rich and beautiful coastline where pirates once roamed, lighthouses became legends, a colony vanished, and man learned to fly. The draw that took them coastward, however, was race dancing. The boys would head to Sea Breeze and hit the dance scene in black “jump joints.” Hicks’ propensity for visiting black nightclubs paid off; he heard new music and learned new moves. When he hit the dance floor, people gathered around for the show. Hicks, however, was more than an exceptional dancer. He was an agent of change.

Having spent a stint in Myrtle Beach, Hicks relocated to Carolina Beach where he changed the music whites listened to. He helped bring blacks’ “bop” sound to white audiences and that, in part, would lead to the rise of the “beach music” sound.

At Carolina Beach, Hicks got to know ex-Merchant Marine Jim Hannah. Hannah had established a Carolina Beach dance spot called the Tijuana Inn, so named because of a trip to the Southwest. As legend puts it, Hicks would make moonshine runs to nearby Sea Breeze. It was there that he heard songs by black artists such as Louis Jordan and His Tympani Five, Lionel Hampton, and Wynonie Harris.

Hicks persuaded Hannah put some race records on the Tijuana Inn’s piccolo (Harlem slang for “jukebox”) records blacks were dancing to in Sea Breeze, a black township. “I got chummy with the jukebox changers,” Hicks said in a 1996 interview, “and I’d say ‘Bring that record and that record.’ I got rid of Glenn Miller in Carolina Beach jukeboxes.”

Change was swift. “You couldn’t get in the place,” said Hannah. “People just loved the music.”

Music Built A Bridge

Soon other jump joints opened along Carolina Beach. Shacks, mostly, they provided the basics: a dance floor, jukebox, and black music. More and more young people could now dance to off-limit black music. The pot began to boil, so to speak.

Johnie Davis lives in Carolina Beach, North Carolina. He’s president of the Cape Fear shag club and a charter member of the OD Social Pavilion and Shag Club in Ocean Drive. Davis recalls a Jim Crow anecdote that illustrates the fascination whites found in black dancers there and provides a possible origin of the term “shag.”

“In the late 1930s and early 1940s during World War II, there was a little village just across the bridge from Carolina Beach called Sea Breeze,” said Davis. “This was a beach destination for African Americans as they could not visit ‘white only’ beaches. In Sea Breeze there were many juke joints, chicken shacks, and boarding houses and hotels that catered to blacks from all over. The dancing there was ‘boogie-woogie’ to very old rhythm and blues music like the Spaniels, Orioles, and Ink Spots, among others.

“During that time GIs were returning home from tours in Europe and had heard the word ‘shag’ over there in an entirely different meaning. Some of those young white boys would slip through the woods at night and watch the dancing. Legend says that at one point someone said, ‘It looks like they are shagging.’ Those boys would come back over the bridge and visit the joints in Carolina Beach and try to copy those dancers and add their own twist to it.”

Davis remembers The Tijuana Inn, the Rec Hall, the Ocean Plaza Hotel (The OP), a pavilion, and many small places with just a jukebox. Wrightsville Beach, Davis added, had the Lumina Pavilion and some other smaller places.

So, where and when did the two races converge on the dance floor? Like many aspects of the shag’s story, no date exists on precisely when white teens, pulled by the power of music, dared cross the race line. The first time blacks and whites mixed on the dance floor remains out of focus, a blend of black and white, gray for sure. A fabled account of the shag’s origin holds that Southern white teenagers jumped the Jim Crow line to dance to black music in a fit of euphoria more so than defiance while watching dancers at black nightclubs. (To Be Continued)