North Myrtle Beach shag ‘master,’ Jeppy McDowell, dies at 76 after battling COVID-19
Before the music started playing, Jeppy McDowell looked timid, waffling between stepping out onto the dance floor with his partner, Judy Bazemore, and staying on the sidelines. As Bazemore tugged on his arm, he grinned, allowing her to drag him out onto the floor.
The two stood awkwardly for a moment as the announcer introduced the song they’d be dancing to, “Out of Nowhere” by Earl Bostic & His Orchestra. It was 1982 and early in his shag dancing career.
Once the music started, though, McDowell fell into his groove, leading Bazemore in a lively Carolina shag, stepping from beat to beat, his leather shoes gliding across the wood floor. This is where McDowell was most himself, his friends and family said, dipping, spinning and stepping a classic shag.
Jeptha Joseph McDowell, but better known as “Jeppy,” was raised in Burlington, North Carolina, and spent several years working and attending school in Raleigh before making North Myrtle Beach his home in the early 1980s where he’d become known as a local shag dancing legend.
McDowell died due to complications from COVID-19 on Oct. 17. He was 76. McDowell is survived by two brothers and several nieces and nephews.
McDowell’s passing comes as others in the North Myrtle Beach shag community have fallen ill and died. In late September, several North Myrtle Beach clubs and restaurants participated in an unofficial Shaggin’ On Main event. In the days and weeks that followed, at least 14 people tested positive for COVID-19, the illness caused by the novel coronavirus.
Two others connected to the shag community have also died, though, like McDowell, it remains unclear if their deaths are related to the events. According to data from the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control, 210 people in the North Myrtle Beach zip code tested positive for COVID-19 in the two weeks following the events.
Though he worked various jobs to make a living, McDowell was best known for his work as the shag dancing instructor at Fat Harold’s Beach Club, where he taught for 40 years. Lulu Quick, the longtime general manager at Fat Harold’s, remembered when the club’s owner, Harold Bessent, known as Fat Harold, helped McDowell get his start.
“Fat Harold was looking for someone to teach shag lessons, and he found Jeppy and he just immediately fit right into the family,” Quick said. “And we were all so close. We didn’t go anywhere without the other one. (McDowell) was a good, good, goodhearted person and one of the best shag teachers out here.”
Initially, McDowell stumbled into dancing. He was 6 years old when his younger brother, Timothy McDowell, won tap dancing lessons in a contest but refused to take them. McDowell agreed to go to the lessons and stuck with it for five years.
His teacher, McDowell later wrote, “would not let us use heel taps, only toe taps. This taught me to dance on my toes.” Those early lessons, plus the fact he grew up next to another shag hall-of-famer, paved the way for McDowell to eventually learn how to shag.
But McDowell didn’t take to shagging right away, either. When he was in the eighth grade, his older brother, Perry, insisted he learn the basic steps of shag dancing. McDowell resisted.
“Then he learned that he was good at it and then girls lined up to dance with him,” said Susan Neal, a longtime friend of McDowell, who knew him and danced with him for decades.
Ronnie Gregory, who knew McDowell for 15 years, said his friend was a “shagging icon.” Gregory serves as the board chairman for the Society of Stranders, and said the “highest honor” he could give McDowell would be to call him a true “ambassador of our dance.”
“There’s people who have different callings in life for different things,” Gregory said. “This guy had rhythm and blues in his soul. You could tell it just like you tell people who have country music in their soul. The Beach and the shag with his calling. It was obvious the way he lived his life.”
Stacy Saville, who runs the bar Saville’s in North Myrtle Beach, lived with McDowell before he died. She too called him a “shag icon” and said he was a wonderful person who taught so many others to dance.
“He was a wonderful roommate, friend and father figure and (sic) I miss him desperately,” Saville said in a text.
McDowell was always introverted and literary, Timothy McDowell remembered. Dancing brought out his social side. McDowell’s friends and family estimated that he taught tens of thousands of people how to shag over his years of teaching.
Neal met McDowell when he was working as a bartender at the Jolly Knave, a popular shag club in Raleigh, and the two quickly hit it off. At first, Neal said she was smitten by McDowell’s moves and good looks. Over time, the two developed a close friendship where, even if they weren’t living in the same city, they’d call each other to check in, and meet up for a meal when they could see each other in person. To this day, Neal said, she’s awed by his skills on the dance floor.
“I forgot how honored I was and how good it was to see him dance,” she said. “He’s definitely left a void in my heart and someone who always had my back as I always had his.”
While living in Raleigh, McDowell worked for a time at an Arthur Murray dance studio, learning and then teaching ballroom dancing. His teaching salary helped pay for some college courses, though he didn’t graduate, his brother said.
However, that teaching job allowed him to learn how to interact with students and by the time he made it to North Myrtle Beach in 1980, he was able to work as a full-time shag teacher. Interested in theater and entertainment, Timothy McDowell said his brother hosted a television show about shag dancing for a while, broadcast from the Spanish Galleon. McDowell never married or had children, instead spending his days teaching shag, working various jobs, reading novels and hanging out with friends at various beach clubs.
“Working a job was just something for him to get some money so he could go to a beach club,” Timothy McDowell said.
After a quarter century of teaching shag at Fat Harold’s, and building his legacy as a local legend, McDowell was inducted into the Shaggers Hall of Fame in 2005. Each year, the Beach Shaggers National Hall of Fame inducts four men and four women and holds a big ceremony where each dancer is introduced, and then shows off their skills by dancing to a classic song. When it was McDowell’s turn, he looked to Neal.
“And he asked me to dance with him, it’s a very neat thing, it’s a wonderful thing,” she said. “It was probably one of the most memorable, honorable times of his life.”
Though he was used to teaching at, and enjoying the semi-annual shag events put on by the Society of Stranders, an organization that promotes and organizes shag dancing, McDowell knew he had to be more careful this fall. The shag organization canceled its annual Fall Migration event in North Myrtle Beach due to a fear of spreading COVID-19, just as it canceled its annual spring event earlier in the year. According to Neal, McDowell was careful about where he went and who he saw during the unofficial, Shaggin’ On Main event, held in place of the Fall Migration.
Gregory, involved in the decision to cancel Fall Migration, said it’s been hard to watch so many people, so many of his friends, fall sick of COVID-19 after attending Shaggin’ On Main. But for so many people in the shag community, dancing is their life, and going months or even a year without it just doesn’t exist in the realm of possibility for them.
“He didn’t go around living his life scared, so to speak,” Gregory said. “But I will say this, the gentleman left this world doing the things that he loved to do.”
Neal, who spoke on the phone with McDowell twice before he died, said that McDowell didn’t believe he got sick from one of the Shaggin’ on Main events. But a week and a half after the events, McDowell was hospitalized, at first in high spirits, but later developing congestion in his lungs that made it difficult for him to breathe, and causing him to be put on a ventilator, she said.
“He knew he did not get it from his lack of judgment from going to the bars on Main Street,” Neal said of her final conversations with McDowell. “He was very careful about who he came into contact with.”
Still, Neal said, she’s heartbroken and angry over his passing.
“This virus should have never got him but it did, and I’m angry about that,” she said. “I’m not angry at him, though would I have scorned him and kicked his butt — I would have if I could get my hands on him. But the other side of me would’ve hugged him and told him I loved him.”
Editor’s note: If you have first-hand information regarding this story and would like to speak to a reporter, please contact Chase Karacostas at ckara@thesunnews.com or J. Dale Shoemaker at dshoemaker@thesunnews.com.
This story was originally published October 22, 2020 at 10:34 AM with the headline "North Myrtle Beach shag ‘master,’ Jeppy McDowell, dies at 76 after battling COVID-19."
