If you’re headed to Myrtle Beach you have to check out The Bowery. It’s a downtown Myrtle Beach Boardwalk Bar, a honky-tonk that is one of the Grand Strand’s legendary institutions. They have ice cold draft beer and live music. There’s karaoke and there’s food available, too. The place has been in business since World War II so you know it has to be good. In fact, this is the bar that the band Alabama got their start in while working for tips! How cool is that!
People walking up and down Ocean Boulevard and the Boardwalk cant' help themselves but to come into this Myrtle Beach Boardwalk Bar -- the live music from The Bounty Hunters, pulls them in. One of the band’s newest members, since July 2007, Philip Swaby, is a curious sight in this rebel-flagged-bedecked unashamed redneck Mecca.
Swaby, 46, is from the Washington, D.C., area and is of Jamaican descent. He’s a classically trained violinist, who’s been playing the Charlie Daniels’ hit “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” almost since the tune hit the airwaves in 1979. “I’ve been asked to play that song thousands of times,” Swaby said, who is tall, rail thin, eloquent and an intellectual who knows he’s in an unusual position as a black man playing country music in a South Carolina honky-tonk. “I realize how unusual it is to be an anomalous musician,” he said, “but I’ve never
