Mike Worley, emcee of the Carolina Beach Music Festival, walks through a sunscreen-scented sea of 4,000 people at Carolina Beach. He heads toward the boardwalk stage, stopping along the way to speak with folks huddled under beach umbrellas, and taking in the unofficial soundtrack of the festival: cold cans cracking open, waves crashing in the distance, and revelers sharing stories about last night’s crowd at the SeaWitch Tiki Bar and plans to attend the shag contest at the Lazy Pirate.
The festival has been a summer mainstay in this New Hanover town since the 1980s, around the time the area was forming a small — but prominent — music scene. Decades before, during the days of Jim Crow, white families would drive by a small Black community called Seabreeze on their way to Carolina Beach. Two white brothers from Durham — Chicken and Bobby Hicks — moved to the seaside town in the ’40s. Chicken would leave occasionally for nights of music and dancing, taking a skiff up to Seabreeze through Snow’s Cut to listen to “race music,” like that of blues shouter Wynonie Harris and jazzman Lionel Hampton, who played at juke joints. Due to segregation, this music wasn’t playing in Carolina Beach.
Chicken eventually convinced white venues in town to play records by Black musicians. In white clubs, it was called “beach music.” Over subsequent decades, beach music came to embrace Black and white musical styles, including big band, soul, country, and Southern rock. With this new trend came a new dance: the Carolina Shag. It’s sort of a descendant of the jitterbug, where dance partners glide along the floor — or the sand — in a six-count, eight-step pattern. By the time the festival began, Carolina Beach was the place in North Carolina for beach music and shagging.
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Worley found his love for the genre through beach music radio, the same way many lifelong fans in the state have. Before he was introducing bands to thousands of music lovers at the Carolina Beach Music Festival, he was listening to those groups in the family’s barn in the Johnson County town of Princeton. When the Worleys grilled out on Saturdays or worked in the yard on Sundays, the voices of beach music radio icons Steve Hardy and Charlie Byrd were always in the background.
Worley has been emceeing the music festival since 2011, and the excitement that he shares with the crowd never fades. “In old country terms, you’re spraying ether in the carburetor,” he says. He means, “you’re getting it fired up.”
On this sunny afternoon, Worley gets the fans on their feet and cheering as he introduces the Band of Oz. The band launches into crowd-pleasing renditions of classics like “Ocean Boulevard” and “Shama Lama Ding Dong.” The audience sings and shags along to the carefree melodies. Worley joins the crowd on the sand and watches one of his favorite bands kick off the largest beach music festival on the North Carolina coast that’s actually hosted on the beach. Around him is a mix of young and old, locals and vacationers, shaggers and beach-chair foot-tappers, all here to enjoy a Carolina tradition that ushered in an era of coastal harmony.
Carolina Beach Music Festival — June 1
3 Cape Fear Boulevard
Carolina Beach, NC 28428
(910) 458-8434
facebook.com/carolinabeachmusicfestival
More to Explore: Discover more June events across the state at ourstate.com/calendar.
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