CAROLINA BEACH — A popular festival is adding another day to its lineup in celebration of its 39th year and just in time of the centennial anniversary of its home strand, Carolina Beach.
Annually, the Carolina Beach Music Festival features multiple bands from the Southern beach music scene, which has its roots planted on Pleasure Island. This year the event takes place June 7 and will feature The Tams, Band of Oz and Jim Quick & The Coastline. However, for folks who also want to enjoy a different genre of music, a second day has been added celebrating reggae.
Pleasure Island Chamber Executive Director Jim DeGilio went before council Tuesday to ask for a vote to approve the second day, which passed unanimously.
Three reggae bands have been secured to perform June 8. The Pleasure Island Chamber puts together the festival annually but is still finalizing contracts of the bands and will be announcing them by the end of January, according to the chamber’s marketing director, Jacqueline Wilkander.
“Throughout the years Carolina Beach residents and fans have shared with us other genres of music that interest them,” she wrote in an email to Port City Daily. “We felt it had a groovy beach-y vibe that, although completely separate from classic ‘beach music,’ was very complimentary. The idea of reggae has had a very warm reception in all of our planning conversations.”
DeGilio told council Tuesday the primary goal of the festival is to “create commerce” for the town and make the event a weekend destination.
“Our hope is that we get people that do want to be here for the whole weekend, they will stay in hotels, they’ll stay in our Airbnbs,” he said Tuesday evening. “They’ll frequent our restaurants, they’ll go into our shops.”
Moving forward, the chamber will switch out the music genre annually on Sunday only. This year they toyed with country and rock, in particular the yacht rock subgenre.
Council member Mike Hoffer asked if the group considered mixing and matching the genres of the bands each day.
“What if I was coming down for the weekend, but I don’t like beach music, so I’m not coming down Saturday,” Hoffer said.
DeGilio stated the chamber considered it but steered away from “watering down the beach music component.” He called it culturally important to the area and the event’s success.
“If we include two beach bands and two reggae bands, our core group of fans on Saturday might get upset and we might see a drop in attendance as a result,” DeGilio said.
The festival, which takes place annually beachside near the Carolina Beach Boardwalk and Gazebo, welcomes upward of 2,000 people. The chamber estimated adding a second day will bring in roughly the same size crowd on Sunday, though with it being a centennial celebration year, Wikander said the chamber is prepared to host more people.
Hoffer asked if reggae, technically, would also be considered “beach music,” having come from the shores of Jamaica. A few folks in the audience clapped back: “no.”
The American South’s “beach music” genre is very specific, born from rhythm and blues and bebop played in juke joints up and down the Atlantic East Coast in the 1940s and 1950s. It is usually accompanied by the Carolinas’ state dance, the shag — also known as “the swing dance of the South.”
The dance and music evolved from others that came before it, including the jitterbug or its predecessor the Big Apple, which traces back to Columbia, South Carolina. Those dances were engaged upon at Seabreeze — a popular Black-owned coastal hamlet — and Freeman Beach, near Pleasure Island. Thousands of vacationers descended to Freeman and Seabreeze during the height of Jim Crow laws, when Black citizens were not allowed on white beaches. More than 30 juke joints were aligned along the nearly two-mile strip of the unincorporated beach at Seabreeze, located across the Intracoastal Waterway at Snow’s Cut Bridge.
A local man by the name of Malcolm “Chicken” Hicks — who has a mural honoring him at 100 Lake Park Blvd. — often snuck into the Seabreeze nightclubs to hear the music and see the dancers. As the lore goes, he brought the music and his interpretation of the moves to white nightclubs in Carolina Beach and is believed to be the first to call it the “Carolina shag.”
Carolina Beach now owns Freeman Park and Seabreeze was memorialized last year with a historical marker. But its cultural impact on music and dance, even after the clubs there closed, migrated to places like Ocean Plaza Ballroom, once on Pleasure Island from 1946 to 2006. Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chubby Checker and Bo Diddly all performed there.
The shag also migrated to the dance floors of Myrtle Beach, as bands like the Four Tops, Tams, and Chairmen of the Board took off in the 1950s and 1960s, creating “beach music” as a blend of R&B and Motown.
“Everybody out here who is a beach music fan will tell you: You do not mix anything else with beach music,” Deb LeCompte s, council member and liaison between the board and beach music committee, said at the council meeting. “It’s a specific genre.”
The chamber already met with police, fire, and parks and recreation to assess any problems with adding a second day. DeGilio said it would be the same setup as Saturday’s event — a “plug and play” — and didn’t pose any problems.
“Everything is set up Saturday,” Tim Murphy, Carolina Beach community services manager, said and added security would be in place overnight.
The event volunteers break down everything Saturday, with the exception of sound, and an officer will secure it in the downtime between Saturday and Sunday bands.
“It will make it easier for us on Sunday morning rather than bringing all that stuff back again, most of it will already be there,” DeGilio said. “But we’ll have to reset the beach for tents … we’ll tear it all down Saturday, put it all back together again on Sunday.”
Tickets to Saturday’s event go on sale on Thursday, Jan. 16, and Sunday tickets soon after. Single day tickets are $35 and a discounted two-day ticket is available for $59. There are also reserved tent spaces available for $300, which include two general admission tickets for one day or $495 (again with GA tickets) for two days.
The event is the chamber’s largest fundraising effort of the year, Wilkander said. “It takes a tremendous amount of planning and a ton of positive energy to produce an event of this size,” she said. “We have had the pleasure of working with a core group of very experienced and dedicated volunteers for this event and they are excited to see it grow and to be a part of it.”
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