Beach music master, legendary SC radio host Woody Windham has died
Woody “With the Goodies” Windham – Columbia’s “Shagmaster General,” the “Pied Piper of Shag” and award-winning South Carolina radio host – died Monday. He was 83.
His radio career stretched over 61 years and several cities, bringing music and joviality to listeners across the state.
For South Carolina old-timers and for longtime lovers of shag dancing and beach music in the state, Windham was one of the most recognizable names and voices over the airwaves for decades.
From daily radio shows to deejaying at live events – New Year’s Eve parties, shag nights at local clubs, the Irmo Okra Strut, you name it – Windham was a near-ubiquitous presence around the Midlands and Lowcountry for decades. He made a name for himself as the host of a variety of radio shows over the years, including his debut hosting “Top Sixty in Dixie” on WCOS in the early 1960s, as well as “The Shag Show” and “The Woody Windham Beach Show,” among many others over the long years.
Windham was also well-known for his charitable fundraising efforts.
As a radio host, he raised more than $1 million for local charities, including the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society. As the co-owner of The Woody, a popular dance club on Columbia’s Main St., he raised money for diabetes research and Harvest Hope food bank.
Windham was such a fixture of South Carolina shag dancing culture for so long, it was no wonder that he finally opened his own dance club in 2011.
The Woody, which Windham co-owned with his daughters, has been voted Best Dance Club by Columbia’s Free Times newspaper readers 10 times.
Running the club with his family, Windham said, fulfilled a longtime dream of his.
At the time the club opened in 2011, he told The State newspaper it was “like a tribute to my 50-year radio career.”
Windham was no stranger to family business.
The Windham Brothers – Woody and Leo – owned the Columbia airwaves in the early- to mid-1970s and got back together on air from 1981-84, when they developed some of their crazy on-air characters including “Beach Billy.”
“We grew up with them,” said Frank Baker, general manager of WOMG radio stations, when he hired the duo to reunite once more in 1994. “They changed our lives and shaped our souls with all the great songs of the 1950s and 1960s.”
Age did not slow Woody Windham down. Even after his days in traditional radio ended, Windham continued to self-broadcast daily over the internet via the aptly dubbed “iWoody Radio” website and app, where he played round-the-clock “handpicked music from Woody Windham’s personal collection.” You can still hear his clips playing now at woodywindham.com.
In a 2017 interview with S.C. Public Radio’s Tut Underwood, Windham said he believed the internet was the future of all radio, and that it was his entire future.
“I’m not going to retire,” Windham told Underwood. “I’m going to die at the mic. I’ll be on the air one day and you hear a thunk–and then total silence. You’ll know that Woody just died at the mic.” And with his signature mirth, he laughed at the thought.
Windham’s daughters posted to The Woody on Main’s Facebook page Monday saying, “Our father, Woody Windham, signed off the air for the final time today. He was home and comfortable, surrounded by his family. He is a man that will be remembered as the voice of some people’s childhoods.”
