On The Beach

Depending on how you reckon it, I either spent three or 28 years writing “Step It Up And Go.” Yes, there were the last few years at the end, when I was directly working on the book. But that was preceded by a quarter-century were I was kind of writing “the first draft of history” of it all in the News & Observer, with features about the “5” Royales, Doc Watson, Nina Simone and more. That produced a body of work I could use as a roadmap in various chapters.

There were a few chapters, however, where I had to basically start from scratch and build them from the ground up — most notably Chapter 7, “Breaking Color Lines at the Beach: The Embers and Beach Music.” Being a snob (and also not too bright), I didn’t take beach music all that seriously for a lot of years. Nevertheless, when it came to the book, beach was just too important a subject to pass over.

The beach chapter actually turned out to be one of my favorites in the entire book, tracing the style’s origins as a product of its era of Jim Crow segregation in the years after World War II. And it fit very neatly alongside Chapter 5 about North Carolina’s most important 1950s-vintage r&b group, Winston-Salem’s “5” Royales, who have a few songs in the beach-music/shag-dancing canon.

If you’re interested in a demonstration showing more about what beach music is and where it came from, the North Carolina Museum of History just opened an exhibit about it that’s well worth checking out. “Beach Music: Making Waves in the Carolinas” will be on display through next September, with an impressive array of artifacts. Here’s a piece I did about the show for the city of Raleigh.

I’ll be doing an online talk about the museum’s beach-music exhibit and my book’s beach chapter at noon on Wednesday, Oct. 14 — “History @ High Noon: Breaking Color Lines at the Beach.” The event is free (as is the exhibit to attend), but it does require advance registration to get the Zoom link.

Drop on by (virtually) and ask some questions.

Left of the dial: You’re gonna hear me on your radio

Logo by Andy Menconi

Radio is like the weather: Everybody (including me) complains endlessly, yet nobody ever seems to do anything about it. So when I was recently offered the opportunity to become part of the problem, what could I do but answer, “Of course”?

Thus we have “That Old North State Radio Hour,” my new radio show about the music of North Carolina. It airs at 7 p.m. Eastern Time Wednesdays on “That Station,” 95.7-FM, the Americana-leaning commercial station that started up in Raleigh back in May. It was their idea for me to do a local-music show, probably because they got tired of me snarking about their playlist.

Since I’ve been studying North Carolina music for a long, long time, my playlist will draw on music from all over the state, beyond Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill. And the first show, from Aug. 1, seemed to go pretty well. Take a listen to the archived version here, and scope the opening-week playlist below. I hope you dig it enough to return in coming weeks — starting this Wednesday, Aug. 8, at 7 p.m. Eastern Time.

Listen over the air at 95.7-FM if you’re within range, or online at ThatStation.net.

# # # #

“That Old North State Radio Radio Hour” — playlist for show #1 (Aug. 1, 2018)

Intro/theme song: “Pink Gardenia,” Flat Duo Jets (Chapel Hill)
“Shot From a Cannon,” Rachel Kiel (Carrboro)
“One-Dime Blues,” Etta Baker (Morganton)
“Song,” Sylvan Esso (Durham)
“Indian,” Third of Never (La Grange)
“The Carolinian,” Chatham County Line (Raleigh)
“Another Love,” Michael Rank (Pittsboro)
“Praying Mantis,” Don Dixon (Chapel Hill)
“The Better Man,” Peter Holsapple (Rougemount)
“Blink,” Django Haskins (Durham)
“Oxcart Blues,” Spider Bags (Carrboro)
“Kick Out the Chair,” Skylar Gudasz (Durham)
“You Will Never Take This Song,” Cardinal Family Singers (Raleigh)
“Right Around the Corner,” “5” Royales (Winston-Salem)
“Miles Away,” Phil Cook (Durham)

https://omny.fm/shows/95-7-fm-that-station/8-1-18-that-old-north-state-radio-hour/embed

https://omny.fm/shows/95-7-fm-that-station/8-8-18-that-old-north-state-radio-hour

https://omny.fm/shows/95-7-fm-that-station/8-15-18-that-old-north-state-radio-hour

 

Next up: “The Big Book of North Carolina Music”

Not quite a year ago, I found myself at an industry convention gathering with some of my rock-writing peers, doing what we all do at these things — swapping stories, telling lies and catching up about projects we had in the works, real as well as imaginary. Talking to another writer I knew, I mentioned that I was working on a book proposal for a history of North Carolina music. His reaction was…surprising.

“Yeah,” he scoffed, “that’ll be a short book.”

Words were exchanged, some of them unpleasant; no, it didn’t go especially well. But almost a year later, I am pleased to report that this “short book” has taken a major step from abstraction to reality. I’ve come to terms and shaken hands with University of North Carolina Press for a book with the working title “The Big Book of North Carolina Music,” which will have a format similar to UNC Press’ 2008 best-seller “Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina Barbecue.”

While this won’t be an encyclopedic A-to-Z history of North Carolina music, my “Big Book” will cover a lot of ground in its 16 chapters — from Charlie Poole in the 1920s to “American Idol” nearly a century later, with Blind Boy Fuller and Rev. Gary Davis, Arthur Smith, “5” Royales, Doc Watson and Earl Scruggs, the dB’s and Let’s Active, Superchunk and Squirrel Nut Zippers and Ben Folds Five, Nantucket and Corrosion of Conformity, beach music, 9th Wonder and J. Cole and more in between. It should come in at close to double the heft of my Ryan Adams book “Losering”; and while that still isn’t nearly as long as it could be, it’s nevertheless the most ambitious book project I’ve ever taken on.

But the beauty part is I’ve already been working on this book, piecemeal, for more than a quarter-century. I moved to Raleigh in 1991 to take the News & Observer music-critic job, and my first day was Jan. 15 — two days before Operation Desert Storm started in Kuwait. That was a time when the Worldwide Web wasn’t much more than a gleam in Paul Jones’ eye, back when most people still got their news by reading it on paper or watching the 6 o’clock news.

I must confess that I didn’t come here thinking the News & Observer would be a long-term destination, but it just worked out that way. Back when newspapers were still prosperous, the desired career trajectory was to spend five years or so at a mid-sized paper like the N&O before trying to move up to the New York Times or some other prestige publication. For a variety of reasons, that never happened. Most of the opportunities that came my way over the years felt like they would have been lateral moves rather than upward ones, although I did get a call from the Washington Post in 1999. But that was right after the birth of my twins, Edward and Claudia. At that moment, starting over in a big city was just not in the cards.

So I stayed in Raleigh and I’ve never regretted it, in large part because North Carolina music turned out to be fascinating and beguiling in ways I never imagined before I lived here. When I arrived, I was fairly well-versed in the North Carolina music I’d heard from afar on college radio — Connells, Let’s Active, Flat Duo Jets and such — without knowing much of anything about the history from farther back. So I’ve spent my years here filling in the history, bit by bit, learning as much as I could about North Carolina’s wildly varied music.

Despite the many variations of this state’s music, I do see all of it as of a piece and part of the same continuum — and “The Big Book of North Carolina Music” will, I hope, tie it all together as one story. I’ve spent the past few months going through my archive of stuff to get it organized (see below), and now begins the real work. TBBoNCM will be my side-project for the next two years, the thing keeping me up late nights and weekends and days off. If all goes according to plan, it will be done and dusted by the end of 2018, with publication to follow in 2019. Fingers crossed!

And yeah, whenever it’s done: I’ll be sending an autographed copy to that colleague.