Myrtle Beach Culture

Myrtle Beach has a genuine popular culture of its own, built in the mid-twentieth century and still practised.

Beach music and the shag

In the 1940s and 50s, white teenagers from the Carolinas came to the pavilions along this coast to dance to Black rhythm and blues records that segregated radio would not play. The music became known as beach music and the dance as the shag — a slow, shuffling six-count swing danced on the spot with intricate footwork and an almost motionless upper body. It became South Carolina’s official state dance in 1984, and North Myrtle Beach still has clubs where it is danced seriously, with competitions and two annual SOS gatherings that bring thousands.

Mini golf

The Strand has an extraordinary concentration of it, in themed courses with volcanoes, pirate ships and waterfalls. It is a genuine local architecture of its own kind.

Brookgreen Gardens

Archer and Anna Hyatt Huntington bought four rice plantations in 1930 and made a garden to display her sculpture and that of her contemporaries. It holds the largest collection of American figurative sculpture in the country.

Seafood and the buffet

Murrells Inlet calls itself the seafood capital of South Carolina and has the creekside restaurants to support the claim, while the strip runs on the all-you-can-eat seafood buffet — an institution here, with fried flounder, shrimp, hush puppies and she-crab soup. Calabash-style, named for a village over the North Carolina line, means lightly battered and fried.

Gullah Geechee

The Lowcountry culture south of here, with its own creole language and foodways.