Ed Weiss, radio DJ who revolutionized Beach music world, dies at 80.
Ed Weiss, a longtime radio DJ credited with helping to bring Beach music into the mainstream, died at home Saturday night, his wife posted on Facebook.
Weiss, better known by his on-air name “Charlie Brown” (a 1959 hit by the R&B group The Coasters) was 80. His radio show, “On The Beach,” was syndicated on about 40 stations across the Southeast, making him one of the most well-known voices in Beach music radio.
Beach music, R&B music largely recorded by Black artists, started gaining traction among young, white North Carolinians in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Because the music industry was still heavily segregated at that point, teenage Carolinians could only hear the music on jukeboxes in beach towns like Atlantic Beach and Myrtle Beach.
In the late 1960s, Weiss convinced Atlantic Records to put out two albums of Beach music, “Beach Beat” and “Beach Beat Vol. 2”. Weiss was given the responsibility of picking out the collection of songs on the albums.
His contribution was noted in small print on the back of the album: “Atlantic Records gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Eddie Weiss in the selection of tunes on this album.”
Those albums helped validate a genre that was still on the fringes of popular music, said John Hook, who runs several Beach music radio syndicates.
“He legitimized this redheaded stepchild subculture called beach music,” he said.
The records also helped beach music spread beyond the Carolinas, said Parke Puterbaugh, a music critic who is writing a history of Beach music for UNC Press.
“That was the first time that the word ‘beach’ appeared in an album title, referencing this sort of beach music phenomenon that was getting traction in the Southeast and especially the Carolinas,” he said.
As Beach music spread, it popularized “shag dancing”— essentially a slowed-down version of the jitterbug — which is now the official popular dance of North Carolina. Weiss was inducted into the Carolina Beach Music Hall of Fame in 1996 for his contributions to the movement.
The hallways of Weiss’ Hillsborough home were papered with signed photos of music legends he’d met, including Sam Cooke, Buddy Holly and Paul Anka, the N&O reported in 2015. He even once interviewed Stevie Wonder during a brief stint at a station in Charlotte.
Despite his huge contribution to North Carolinian music and dance, Hook said Weiss was relentlessly humble.
“He put on no airs about changing the listening world and the entertainment world and the dancing world,” Hook said.
