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Radio station 104.9 FM in Ridgeland has new ownership and a new format. It recently switched from "beach, boogie, blues and some jazz" to what I call goldie oldies.
There's nothing wrong with goldie oldies. In fact, I am one. Who knew when our teenage blood was running hot that we would still be swinging to "Wipe Out" in our walkers?
But those who love the rhythm and blues known as beach music mourn another dead soldier. The music has yanked at hearts in the Carolinas for more than 60 years, pulling them onto the dance floor to do the shag. The whole time, its followers have had to work to find the music that flames their endless summer.
Kids flocked to Carolina beaches to hear it on jukeboxes beginning in 1945 because radio stations at home wouldn't play "race music" by black performers.
They could pick it up late at night on WLAC in Nashville. Starting in the late 1940s, jive-talking WLAC deejays John R, Gene Nobles and Hoss Allen fueled this reckless indulgence in stuff parents didn't want their kids to hear.
Soon, a few small Carolina stations far from the shore would play beach music for an hour or two at a time. And to this day, that's about how it goes on the radio. A little here and a little there. The syndicated show "On The Beach with Charlie Brown" hits about 40 stations each week. Local morning deejay Monty Jett has done weekly shows of the beach music he grew up with inthe Lowcountry. For a while we had "The Breeze Radio Network" featuring "beach, boogie and blues" by South Carolina's Windham brothers, Woody and Leo.
Pat Patterson of Clinton was the on-air personality for the local beach music station we were lucky to have for about three years, thanks to JB Broadcasting of Greenwood owned by John Broomfield.
It was largely Patterson's music collection we were hearing, and he insists the beat that transformed him from a fire chief to a disc jockey has universal appeal. The station's Internet site got e-mails from all over America and abroad, including some from troops in Afghanistan. A lady in Canada thought she was hearing new music, but it was The Dominoes from the '50s.
"It's such happy music," Patterson told me this week. "Even the rhythm of the music is upbeat. It always brings a smile to the face. It makes you want to dance. You listen to it, and somebody in there somewhere is having a large time."
Patterson's special blend of the music soon will be streaming 24/7 on his Web site: djpatpatterson.net.
For beach music, the tide ebbs and the tide floods. But the summer never ends.
