08/26/2026
The official state dance of North Carolina was invented by teenagers who were not supposed to be listening to that music in the first place. 🎵
In the late 1940s and 1950s, white kids from the Carolinas started driving to the beach pavilions and slipping into juke joints where the jukeboxes were loaded with rhythm and blues records by Black artists that almost no mainstream station would play. They called the records beach music. The dance that grew up around them was the s**g, a smooth low slung six count step built for a crowded wooden floor and a slow humid night, all footwork and almost no upper body.
It spread from pavilion to pavilion up and down the coast, and the records circulated in a kind of underground economy of jukebox operators and shop owners who knew what the kids wanted. The music crossed a color line that everything else in those towns was working hard to keep in place, which is a complicated thing to sit with and worth sitting with anyway.
North Carolina named the s**g its official popular dance in 2005, and the pavilion floors that are left are still worn smooth in the exact places you would expect. 🌅
**g
