"My True Love" – The Tams · Explore NMB 🎵 🎶

"My True Love" – The Tams

2025 CBMA National Dance Song of the Year

The video opens on the dance floor at the Spanish Galleon—and the song delivers exactly what that image promises. She's standing by the stage, jamming to The Tams playing "What Kind of Fool Do You Think I Am." He's been hurt and cheated on. They catch each other's eyes….It's a love song about finding love at a beach music show—meta in the best way, and perfectly suited for the Dance Song of the Year.

Three generations of the Pope-Cottle family are keeping The Tams alive and charting—still donning the tam o'shanter hats that gave the group its name, still delivering those harmony-rich vocals that made them soul music legends. Little Redd (Albert Cottle Jr.) got his first shot on stage in 1976 at the Admiral's Showroom in Myrtle Beach—he was seven years old and, by his own admission, messed up his part of "Be Young, Be Foolish, Be Happy." His father Charles Pope, a founding member, gave him one more chance. Nearly fifty years later, Little Redd leads the group, and now his son Mikai represents the third generation, handling solo verses and the acrobatic stage moves his father used to do.

The song that earned them Dance Song of the Year comes from an unlikely source: Charlie Sattenfield, a former Nashville jingle writer whose biggest credit was co-writing "Run to the Front" for Dale Earnhardt in 1987. After decades in advertising, Sattenfield found beach music through Craig Woolard and has been on a remarkable late-career run—"Ocean Drive" by Archie Bell was Song of the Year in 2021, and "Summertime Memories" won Duo/Collaboration of the Year in 2022. Now, as a second act, this songwriter is proving it's never too late to find your groove.

"My True Love" connects all of it: a legacy group with genuine bloodline continuity, a songwriter hitting his stride decades after most would have stopped, and a song built for the very dance floor it celebrates. With Valentine's Day this Saturday, you could do worse than finding your own true love the same way—standing by the stage, catching someone's eye while the band plays on. The CBMA voters got it right.

This article 1st appeared in the Surf LINE Issue 2

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