Six Nights a Week for Tips: The Bowery, Where Alabama Learned to Sing

Before the 42 number-one singles, before the 73 million records sold, before the 2005 induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame, Alabama was a broke bar band called Wild Country playing a beer joint on the Myrtle Beach boardwalk for whatever landed in the tip jar. That joint is still there. It's called The Bowery, and it may be the most historically important room on the entire Grand Strand — a fact it wears with exactly zero pretension.

The place opened in 1944 and celebrated its 75th anniversary in 2019, which makes it, in 2026, an eighty-two-year-old survivor on a boulevard that has torn down and rebuilt itself a dozen times over. In 1973, cousins Randy Owen, Teddy Gentry, and Jeff Cook became the house band and stayed for seven summers, playing six nights a week and sharpening the tight family harmonies that would define country radio for a decade. "The Bowery was a great place to be a band, a great place to write and create," Owen has said. They left when RCA came calling in 1980. The rest is on the wall by the door, in photographs and memorabilia.

What keeps The Bowery from being a plaque, though, is that it never stopped being a bar. For more than twenty years the house band has been the Bounty Hunters, cranking out country-rock to a working-class, sunburned, cash-only kind of crowd. There's no advance-ticket app, no VIP bottle service, no reason to dress up. The motto — "Ya can't beat fun" — is both the mission statement and the ceiling, and that's the charm. Country stars vacationing on the Strand have been known to wander in and sit in, precisely because nobody's making a production of it. Owner Victor Shamah, who once toured selling Alabama's merch before he owned the place, keeps it that way on purpose.

Why does it matter now? Because origin stories are usually paved over, and this one is still pouring drafts. You can stand in the actual room where one of the best-selling American bands of all time figured out who they were, order a cheap beer, and hear a bar band play "Mountain Music" while tourists who have no idea what happened here dance anyway. Authenticity on the Strand is rare and easily faked; The Bowery doesn't have to fake it, because it simply never left.

Go on a weeknight. Read the wall. Tip the band. You can't beat it.

Sources: The Bowery — Alabama; The Bowery has been a Myrtle Beach landmark for 75 years — Discover SC; 'It's an institution' — WMBF News