NORTH MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. -- By 10 o’clock on this Friday night, the joint was jumping at Fat Harold’s Beach Club, just down Main Street, near where the asphalt meets the sand. Customers milled around the bar, talking, drinking, looking and, to be honest, hoping to be looked at. It could have been a college crowd in any college town, except that many of these partiers were at retirement age or close to it.

Around the room, the slight glimmer in the eyes, the extra additive of confidence and the struts through the crowd, all enhanced by alcohol -- that’s ageless. A new dance-ready version of ‘‘You Are My Sunshine’’ by Heaven Davis was playing through the speakers, and more than a few couples were giving it their best shot on the dance floor. One guy in a short-sleeve white sports shirt poked his tongue out in delight as he spun his partner around before facing her again with a grin. Besides being a distinctly older bunch, the crowd was predominantly white.

Bernie and Julia Lyons Brooks were an exception.

‘‘This is a good place,’’ he said during a break. ‘‘We like the music.’’

‘‘This is the same as rock ’n’ roll in the black community,’’ she said.

Though it may be grounded in rhythm-and-blues, the beach music scene in the Carolinas has always been a bastion of white America. Southern white America. In the glory years of the 1950s and ’60s, crowds of Southern belles and penny-loafered, peg-pants kids would come together for good times. To fraternize. To party. To dance. That generation is aging, but for the most part, said South Carolina author Bo Bryan, the beach music scene remains mostly a white affair. ‘‘There are some black guys who show up, and they’re accepted. That’s one thing about the whole deal,’’ he said. ‘‘If you were buck-toothed, tall or fat or thin or had a mole between your eyes, it didn’t matter. If you could dance, you were accepted.’’ In the beginning, beach music was pure soul. Laying the foundation to the summer soundtracks of these pimply white kids was black R&B. Music with a dance beat performed live by pomenaded men in gaudy neon jackets and pants so tight that you knew something just had to give. The music hooked John Bellamy something bad. ‘‘I’m addicted to it like a junkie,’’ he said. Bellamy is 49 and a federal firefighter with the Department of the Army at Sunny Point, just south of Wilmington.

It was earlier in the day on the beach-front stretch of Main Street still fondly known to the old-timers as Ocean Drive. Bellamy was shopping at Judy’s House of Oldies on the corner of Main and Hillside Drive. The family owned business specializes in oldies, shag dance, swing dance, and current and vintage R&B records. On one shelf were 14 videotapes, all featuring nine-time National Shag Dance champions Charlie & Jackie, and all providing how-to instruction for the shagger wannabe. Bellamy said he has 8,000 to 10,000 beach music albums and songs that he plays all the time at his home just outside Long Beach, N.C.

By the time he was 14, Bellamy was shagging. He’s a drummer, too, so he knows a good beat when he hears it. Bellamy has been laying down the backbeat for beach bands since the early part of the ’60s. ‘‘I love it. It’s in my blood,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s not tear-jerking music. It’s happy music. Most people who hear it want to dance to it all the time.’’

The connection for such rapturous beach fans as Bellamy lies in both the music and the dance, according to Judy Collins, whose name graces the front of Judy’s House of Oldies. Her father, the late Rufus Oates, opened the first music store on the Grand Strand in 1963. ‘‘This little area is real powerful for S.O.S. and people finding out about the music,’’ said Collins, who bears an uncanny resemblance to comedian Roseanne Barr. She was talking about the Society of Stranders, the mothership of the many shag dance associations and clubs. ‘‘I don’t think it’s dying at all. I think it’s the reverse. I don’t think we’ve seen the peak yet. What people don’t realize -- it’s all over the country. Little pockets all over the country. ‘‘And with the Internet, they are starting to connect.’’

Judy’s House of Oldies is one of the stops along Ocean Drive that attract fans of beach music and shag dancing to the area. ‘‘Welcome to North Myrtle Beach, Home of the Shag,’’ is splashed across a cream-colored water tower looming over the store and the town. Judy Corley is executive director of the North Myrtle Beach Chamber of Commerce. She said the annual beach music awards -- the Cammy Awards -- are moving to North Myrtle Beach from Myrtle Beach. ‘‘One of our goals is to create a beach music festival. Not a shag festival, but a beach music festival. It’s a big part of North Myrtle Beach. It’s what brought people here at 15, 16, and it’s what brought them back at 50 and 60 to live.’’ Many of those people will remember The Pad.

An old house on Ocean Boulevard with a pretty fair hardwood floor, the Pad was known for 25-cent beer and the old R&B selections that played on the jukebox. The club opened on July 4, 1955, the year after Hurricane Hazel brought devastation to the pavilions, the piers and the familiar dance haunts along the Carolina coast. The Pad’s long run at the beach ended Jan. 28, 1994, when it was razed. In its place came The Barrel, but that gray, wooden establishment closed last year. It stands empty across the street from the Boulevard Grill, shards of broken beer bottles littered on the sidewalk out front. Among other hangouts, there was Sonny’s Grill, which was another juke joint, and one that has been likened to a poor man’s version of the old Spivey’s Pavilion before Hazel.

Living legends

As for Ocean Drive, circa 2000, Fat Harold’s and Ducks across Main Street continue to tug on hearts, luring the sentimentalist and the novice to the area for a facsimile of the past. Sherrill Meredith, originally from Gastonia, N.C., began coming to Ocean Drive when she was about 25. She moved here to stay in ’74. ‘‘I love it here,’’ she said, sitting at a counter inside Fat Harold’s, a plastic cup of Miller Lite in front of her. ‘‘I hated it the first nine months. I fell into Fat Harold’s family. Now I wouldn’t leave.’’ She and Harold “Fat Harold” Bessent own this business, whose front entrance resembles a jukebox.

Meredith was recently inducted into the Living Legends. The organization, established in 1986, honors those who were at the beach early on and some of the shaggers from bygone years. Tourists to the North Myrtle Beach area will find oodles of this sort of thing.

There are Shaggers Hall of Fame brick ‘‘pavers,’’ with the names of shag clubs and enthusiasts, engraved in some of the sidewalks and parking areas.

The Shagging Hall of Fame Museum is loosely spread out along some of the walls of the Ocean Drive Resort Hotel and the adjoining nightclubs, Harold’s at O.D. and the Spanish Galleon. Plaques of the inductees from each year hang from the wall, with their fond remembrances of the beach and their contrasting photos from past and present framed in brass for all to see. Sprinkled among the honorees are names like Ann Moore, ‘‘Boney’’ Russell Moore, Fort Bragg-born Susan Jarrett Neal, David Michael, Cindy Murphy Campbell of Laurinburg, ‘‘Cadillac Jack’’ Smith and E. Arnold Webb.

Tamela Howard is the 36-year-old manager of Beach Memories, a downtown shop that sells shag memorabilia and artwork. An original poster from ‘‘Shag, the Movie,’’ a 1988 motion picture set in 1963 Myrtle Beach, hangs on the wall. Howard’s a local. Her mother taught her how to shag when Howard was 10. ‘‘I think that most people who grew up here know how to shag,’’ she said.

During the off-season, the town tends to fill up again when the Society of Stranders holds its 10-day shag festivals in April and September. Another one, a mid-winter retreat, has been added to the S.O.S. calendar in January. Crowds estimated at more than 20,000 have been known to attend. The town has a year-round population of about 12,000. During the summer, it can reach 100,000 people a day. ‘‘They come into town and shag,’’ said Howard. ‘‘They don’t come into town to buy memorabilia. They come into town to release. To have fun.’’

Young fans

On this evening in early May, North Myrtle Beach High School was holding its senior prom at the Ocean Drive Resort. By 6 o’clock, prom-goers were arriving to get their pictures taken. They were dressed in tuxes and ties and long puffy dresses and awkward heeled shoes, a sharp contrast to the casual nature of the beach. En route to the photographer, they would pass the framed pictures and memories of some of the shagging hall-of-famers. People who experienced this rite of passage long ago in their youth. ‘‘We love beach music,’’ said Charles Earnhardt, 19, clutching a pair of sunglasses in his hand. ‘‘I don’t personally know how to shag, but I want to learn.’’

Brandy Rote, who is 17, and her 18-year-old date, Jason Case, sat out on a park bench eating ice cream in formal attire on Ocean Drive. The two plan on getting married after college and move away, perhaps to Tennessee. At this time, Ocean Drive is not calling them home.

‘‘With the shaggers and when they have biker weeks,’’ she said, ‘‘it gets really noisy and trashy around here.’’

‘‘Makes it like one really big motel,’’ he muttered between bites of Death By Chocolate.

After the prom, they were going to go out to eat. Then they planned to wander over to the beach. Sit. Wait. And watch the sun rise. While those two would like nothing better than to, as soul man Clarence Carter sang back in 1968, slip away, there was a Fayetteville couple in the crowd at Fat Harold’s that night who have decided this is a good place to stay.

Claude and Betty Collins own Discount Tire in Spring Lake. He’s pony-tailed at 55, and she’s 49. This past January they bought a place at North Myrtle Beach, about 1½ miles from the club. They have been coming down from Fayetteville about every weekend since. ‘‘Everybody’s friendly, and it’s just good people,’’ he said. ‘‘Kind of like a family.’’

Betty Collins was brought up with the shag, and she was doing the dance by the time she turned 13. Claude didn’t start learning to shag until last year. With Johnny Taylor’s ‘‘You Can Strike Gold’’ playing, the two of them started to inch their way back to the dance floor for more. She said they have a friend who says, ‘‘‘How many people are in the world? Say, if there were 200,000, there are 200,000 ways to shag.’ Everybody puts a different step to it.’’

‘‘We’re not professionals,’’ he said, his hand placed on his wife’s back. ‘‘We have a good time doing it.’’