Celebration! We begin our 27th year of The Beach Music Top 40 on the first day of fall. It was September 1992 when we began this version of our Beach Music Chart. There were earlier versions in It Will Stand Magazine in the late 70s. By the early 80s we were publishing the dance selections of Shag contest competitors throughout the Carolinas / Georgia / Virginia. Not exactly an aggregation of the most popular songs, but closer than before. (continued below the chart)
In 1987, following the debut of the world's first, 24/7 Beach Music station, 100,000 watt WRDX (Beach 106.5), out of Salisbury, we started Carolina Class magazine in the spring. From the first issue forward, there was an extensive set of charts in every issue. During that era, we invited several dozen people who grew up with and loved Beach and Shag from the mid-Atlantic and Southeast to help with a project 'beyond' the weekly Top 40 -- the assembly of what became, 20 years later, the Beach Music Guides Vols 1 & 2. Voting took 15 years: assembly of all the songs each year that 'might have been' Shag songs, sending out the lists of 200--600 songs per year via snail mail, inviting about six dozen people to go through the lists ranking each song on a scale of 1 to 10 to reflect popularity of the song. Tabulation of the lists, combined with lists from radio shows we collected over the years, juke box lists, etc. From those we developed a Top 40 chart for every year from 1945 forward.
However, we considered those charts incomplete....we wanted to reflect the uniqueness of many communities, juke boxes, resorts, lake side dance slabs with juke boxes, high school juke boxes and so forth. We included many more charts of unique songs that weren't known well enough, or broadly enough, to make the Top 40 charts, but they are notable for their contribution to the Beach Music legacy nonetheless.
The Roadhouse Blues and Boogie Top 40 was destined to happen after the widespread changes that came to Beach Music in fall 1978. It was at a Shag contest that enterprising DJ, the late Mike Lewis, decided to add something to stave off the boredom of the same old songs. He added Delbert McClinton to the mix. Not long after Ray Sharpe's Texas Blues album was added to the playlist as was Rockin' Louie and the Mamma Jammers from England. Jump Blues exploded eventually permeating dance contests, radio shows, and band playlists.
Over time, newcomers and old school R&B devotees realized they wanted more and more jump blues style dance and entertainment. R&B became a significant part of Beach Music and Shag culture with the debut of Fessa' Hook's Saturday Night Fish Fry on 50,000 watt clear channel WBT out of Charlotte from 1981 to 1983.