Charting the Tides of Carolina Beach Music and the Shag.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

For many, the term "beach music" evokes the vocal harmonies of the Beach Boys; however, Carolina beach music shares little in common with the surf music of California. Products of the segregated landscape of the Carolina coast, beach music and an associated dance called the shag emerged as white teenagers ventured into Black jook joints, transporting "race records" and swing-style dance steps to white beach pavilions. Despite their cultural significance and elevated legal status as official state symbols of South Carolina, both beach music and the shag remain largely unheard of outside the Southeast. There have been no critical histories of beach music and the shag or systematic attempts to analyze their stylistic conventions or social value. Drawing on interviews with members of the beach music and shag community and scholarship on popular music, identity, and cultural exchange, I argue that beach music and the shag serve as crucial sites for the negotiation of cultural identities tied to region, race, generation, and place. In my first two chapters, I trace the history of beach music and the shag from their origins in the 1940s to the present, examining their development in dialogue with the social, cultural, and ecological landscapes of the Carolina coast. In my third chapter, I analyze the extent to which beach music can be appropriately defined as a genre. Using Franco Fabbri's five genre rules as a framework, I analyze beach music and the shag to delineate the genre conventions that underlie the coherence and organization of the scene. In my fourth chapter, I theorize beach music and the shag as the foundation of a regional lifestyle, a communal practice of identity formation that enables participants to actively construct both self and space. Finally, I conclude with an epilogue describing the present concerns and future hopes of the beach music and shag scene. Ultimately, this dissertation contributes the first substantive study of beach music and the shag to the field of musicology, while also offering new perspectives on cultural history, southern heritage, and the processes through which music and movement construct space.