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On a stage set up just yards away from the Carolina coast, The Embers, featuring Craig Woolard — beach-music road warriors who have logged countless miles — amble into the spotlight looking free and easy in colorful Hawaiian shirts and matching white slacks. The drummer counts off a laid-back 4/4 beat, and the three horn players raise their instruments and launch into the group’s signature song.

“I love beach music, ’cause I was born with it in my bones,” Woolard coos in a soulful lilt over a shuffling guitar punctuated by taut blasts of trumpet, trombone, and saxophone. “I learned to shag on the beach, the salt in the air, and the sand at my feet.”

Craig Woolard photograph by Tyler Northrup

Off to the side of the stage, a couple in their mid-60s — he in shorts and flip-flops; she in a sarong and heels — join hands and begin moving in gracefully synchronized forward and backward steps. Other couples follow suit as beach balls bounce above the crowd, which, on this summer day, extends from the rolling dunes to the main drag.

It’s a scene that’s played out in some way every summer since Carolina beach music was born back in the late 1940s. The sound — classic African American R&B, most often performed by white bands whose love of Black music runs deep — evolved alongside the shag: a dance that some called the jitterbug with a Southern drawl.

By the 1950s, young white teens were sneaking off during the Jim Crow era to shag to this forbidden music that played on jukeboxes at clubs like the Tijuana Inn in Carolina Beach. Before long, some of those teens began forming R&B bands of their own. In 1958, Bobby Tomlinson, a drummer, and Jackie Gore, a guitarist with a voice like an angel, formed The Embers in Raleigh. By the mid-’60s, a string of like-minded groups across the state — the Band of Oz in Greenville; The Catalinas in Charlotte; The Dynamic Episoders in Hickory — were performing at frat parties across the Southeast.

The term “beach music” first popped up in the mid-’60s, but it wasn’t really solidified until the late ’70s, after The Embers released their signature song and this smooth R&B sound and its concurrent dance style enjoyed a massive revival. By then, the original shaggers’ sons and daughters — kids who’d grown up watching their parents sway in the summer breeze to early beach-music classics — saw nostalgia in the music and dance steps. And they loved The Embers, the cream of the beach-music crop, the beasts from the east who’d amassed a huge following, operated dance clubs in Raleigh and Atlantic Beach, and already were considered legends of the strand.

Today, The Embers still reign supreme, though neither of its founders remain with the band. Woolard is the longest-lasting Ember, having been with the group on and off since its late-’70s heyday. But no one seems concerned with the current lineup as the musicians breeze through familiar classics that span the decades: Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me,” Spiral Starecase’s “More Today Than Yesterday,” The Trammps’ “Hold Back the Night,” The Chairmen of the Board’s showstopper, “Carolina Girls.”

And, of course, The Embers’ own signature anthem, “I Love Beach Music.”