NUMBER ONES – Excerpt
“This one is a gasser,” said Dick Clark, shaking his head as if he couldn’t believe what the world was about to see. “It’s a pretty frightening thing. It’s sweeping the country all over the place.” Clark’s eyebrows went up, as if to emphasize this next point: “Hottest dance sensation in the last four years, a thing called the twist.”
Dick Clark was a pitchman, a guy who’d been an ad reader before becoming America’s most successful teenage-dance-show host. He knew how to sell things. But Clark wasn’t exaggerating about the twist. Clark had just turned thirty, and he’d already made a fortune, partly by recognizing the hottest dance sensations when they came along and by knowing how to present them to America. Clark knew that the twist was having its moment, and he knew exactly how to frame that moment.
As a phenomenon, the dance sensation is a whole lot older than rock ’n’ roll. There’s a direct line from jazz-age trends like the jitterbug to the televised contortions of the early rock ’n’ roll era. Like most varieties of pop music since, swing was a crucial site of cross-racial conversation and appropriation in American life. In the twenties, young white adventurers would travel uptown, visiting hallowed Harlem institutions like the Savoy Ballroom. They would then attempt their own variations on the Black dances that they witnessed in those venues, and those dances would make their way into mainstream white culture—first bringing a whiff of sex and scandal, then slowly losing that vitality and turning into kitsch. That’s more or less what happened with the twist when mainstream-entertainment purveyors like Dick Clark got hold of it, too.
The twist itself also predates rock ’n’ roll. The Virginia Minstrels, a Black American vaudeville group, performed a song called “Grape Vine Twist” while touring England as early as 1844. On his 1912 ragtime number “Messin’ Around,” Black songwriter Perry Bradford admonished dancers to “twist around with all your might.” Duke Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton recorded tracks with the word “twist” in their titles. In those songs, “twist” has a nebulously sexual meaning—part dance, part innuendo. But in the late fifties, the twist became something else. It became something you could watch on TV.
When it first exploded in the fifties, rock ’n’ roll was really just a new name for rhythm and blues, the raw and insistent form of Black pop music that had already been evolving for years. Before white singers like Elvis Presley began doing their own variations of it, rhythm and blues was the dominion of Black stars like Hank Ballard, the Detroit born singer and leader of a vocal group called the Midnighters. Ballard and the Midnighters first broke out with the 1954 single “Work with Me, Annie,” a barely disguised sex song that topped Billboard’s R&B chart and crossed over into the top 40 of the magazine’s pre–Hot 100 pop charts even though the magazine’s writers referred to the song as “smut.” “Work with Me, Annie,” which Ballard wrote, inspired answer songs like “Work with Me, Henry,” the hit that first put Etta James on the map, and it made Ballard a star on the so-called chitlin circuit of Black nightclubs.
One night in 1957, Ballard stayed at the same Florida hotel as the Sensational Nightingales, a gospel group whose members were big fans of the Midnighters. Some of them brought Ballard a blues song that was too secular for the Nightingales to record. Ballard rewrote the song, and he set it to a version of the melody from “What’cha Gonna Do,” a 1955 R&B hit from Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters. (Five years later, after McPhatter had left the group, the Drifters and new leader Ben E. King would score their own Hot 100 chart-topper with the pop masterpiece “Save the Last Dance for Me.”) Ballard had himself listed as the sole songwriter of this new track, and he released it as the B-side to the Midnighters’ 1959 ballad “Teardrops on Your Letter.” Ballard called that song “The Twist.”
“Teardrops on Your Letter,” released on the Cincinnati indie King Records, became an R&B hit, but its B-side hit even bigger when DJs started playing it at record-hop dances. “The Twist” is a simple, fast rumble of a song, built around Ballard’s ecstatic exhortations. Ballard pleads, “Take me by my little hand, and go like this.” Behind him, the Midnighters chant, “Round and round and round.” When the Midnighters played a ten-night stand at Baltimore’s Royal Theater, the young people in the predominantly Black crowd improvised their own dance to “The Twist.” Soon after, the white teenage regulars on The Buddy Deane Show, a dance-party program that aired on TV, started doing that version of the twist on camera. (The Buddy Deane Show, the inspiration for John Waters’s Hairspray, was canceled in 1964 because the station WJZ was unwilling to show Black and white kids dancing together.)
Before long, the twist made its way a hundred miles north, to the center of the teenage-dance-party universe. American Bandstand, the biggest of the dance-party TV shows, had begun broadcasting from Philadelphia in 1952. In 1957, original host Bob Horn was fired amid a string of underage-sex and drunk-driving scandals, and the boyish and smooth Dick Clark took over. That same year, Clark pitched Bandstand to the heads of ABC. The network, which originally saw Bandstand as cheap daytime programming, started broadcasting Bandstand nationally. The show became an immediate hit. Suddenly, kids across the country had a chance to hear records and see dances that might’ve been local phenomena in earlier years. Sales of 45-RPM singles exploded.
From the very beginning, Dick Clark put his considerable business instincts into making money from rock ’n’ roll. Often, publishing companies, desperate to get their singles into Bandstand rotation, would give songwriting credit to Clark himself, which meant Clark had a financial stake in those songs’ success. Clark even co-owned a label called Swan Records and a few publishing firms, and he’d reliably promote his own records. Amid the payola scandal of 1960, which took down pioneering rock ’n’ roll DJs like Alan Freed, Clark had to drop all his investments in the record business. As Ballard’s “The Twist” was starting to take off, Clark testified in front of a House subcommittee hearing on payola, and his respectful, professional manner may have saved his job and reputation.
Clark was always mindful of his image. Where rock ’n’ roll had been a rebellious teenage phenomenon, Clark was quick to remove any sense of danger from Bandstand. The kids who danced on the show adhered to a strict dress code, and while the show’s dancers and performers were integrated, they skewed heavily white. Sometimes, the white kids on the show would pass off dances that they’d learned from their Black classmates as their own inventions. Rather than relying on anarchic performers like early Bandstand guest Jerry Lee Lewis, Clark minted clean, approachable new teenage idols like his Swan Records protégé Freddy Cannon. Even after the payola scandal, Clark maintained close ties with Philadelphia labels like Cameo-Parkway, which made a lot of money by turning good-looking local teenagers such as Charlie Gracie and Bobby Rydell into heartthrob singers who played well on Bandstand. When Clark saw a new dance becoming popular, sometimes he’d call his friends in the business and tell them to put together a song to go along with the dance.
When Clark first heard “The Twist,” he didn’t hear money. Clark featured Ballard and the Midnighters on Bandstand, but he didn’t push them hard. Some members of the Midnighters had been arrested for lewd acts like dropping their pants onstage. Radio stations had banned songs like “Work with Me, Annie” and the Midnighters’ follow-up single, “Sexy Ways.” Ballard himself claimed that the group’s live act consisted of “doing dirty shit onstage.” If Dick Clark was going to beam “The Twist” into American living rooms, he needed someone with a brighter, cleaner image than Hank Ballard and the Midnighters. Clark had to make sure that he could package and control “The Twist” on his own terms.
Freddy Cannon once claimed that Clark had deemed “The Twist” “too Black” to play on Bandstand and that he wanted Cannon to record it instead. But Cannon already had another single doing well at the time, and so the song went to another local teenager. Ernest Evans, a good-looking Black kid born in South Carolina, had spent his teenage years living in South Philadelphia public housing. He’d gone to high school with Frankie Avalon and Fabian, two white teen idols who became popular on Bandstand, and he wanted to be a singer like them. Evans would sing while plucking and cutting chickens at a local poultry market. Evans’s boss became his manager, and he introduced Evans to Dick Clark.
Clark needed someone to record some tracks for a singing Christmas card that he’d made for his family. Evans was a gifted mimic, and he sang in a few different voices for Clark’s card. He was so good at impersonating Fats Domino that Clark’s wife, Barbara, gave him a new stage name: “You’re Chubby Checker, like Fats Domino.” His ability to do other singers’ voices got the newly renamed Chubby Checker signed to Cameo-Parkway. On the novelty tune “The Class,” his first single, Checker sang nursery rhymes in the voices of Fats Domino, Elvis Presley, and the Chipmunks. Checker lip-synched “The Class” on American Bandstand, and the song became a minor hit. Soon afterward, the heads of Cameo-Parkway decided to record their own version of “The Twist.” Cameo exec Dave Appell: “We figured we’d do [Ballard’s] record with a kid, and then we would at least be on the Clark show.” Chubby Checker was the kid.
The Chubby Checker version of “The Twist” is nearly identical to Hank Ballard and the Midnighters’ original, right down to the note-for-note facsimile of the first song’s honking saxophone solo. A local group called the Dreamlovers replicated the Midnighters’ backing vocals, and Checker did his best version of Ballard’s lead. In addition to American Bandstand, Clark had begun hosting a weekly prime-time series, The Dick Clark Show, from a New York studio. That’s where Clark first showcased Chubby Checker’s version of “The Twist.” A grinning Checker mimed his way through both the song and a stiffer, less hump-heavy version of the dance. The audience in the theater shrieked its approval. (Those audience members were sitting down, so they couldn’t really dance along with Checker, but at least a couple of
them tried.)
Hank Ballard was relaxing in a Florida hotel pool when he first heard Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” on his transistor radio. At first, Ballard thought he was hearing himself. Later, he told an interviewer about his reaction: “Wow, I’m finally getting some white airplay! I’m going to be a superstar!” Ballard’s version of “The Twist,” reissued as its own single, actually debuted on the Hot 100 two weeks before Chubby Checker’s cover. But Ballard’s original peaked at #28. Checker had Bandstand on his side, and his version went all the way to #1.
In both its Hank Ballard and its Chubby Checker versions, “The Twist” is a fast, energetic, extremely likable song. Ballard and Checker both deliver the lead vocal in charismatic bellows. Both versions of the song have propulsive backing vocals and fast, pounding beats. “The Twist” isn’t an artistic masterpiece, but that was never the intent. It’s a song that exists simply to get people moving, and it succeeds at that. In its kinetic simplicity, “The Twist” set the template for decades of dance-craze hits that followed.
Clark may have resisted “The Twist” at first, but the song turned out to be perfect for Bandstand. As a dance, the twist was energetic and improvisatory enough that the show’s teenage regulars could perfect their own personalized versions. The twist was adaptable enough that it didn’t have to be sexualized, and it was simple enough that anyone could do it. Just as important, the twist didn’t require a partner, so shows like Bandstand were never in danger of violating any morality codes. In 1957, ABC canceled The Big Beat, the dance show hosted by pioneering rock ’n’ roll DJ Alan Freed, after its cameras showed Frankie Lymon, the young Black star, dancing with a white girl. Since the twist was a non-contact dance, Dick Clark didn’t have to worry about anything like that happening.
“The Twist” was the first dance-craze record ever to top the Hot 100, and its success demonstrated the power of Bandstand. Many more dance-craze songs followed. A few months later, Checker followed “The Twist” up with “Pony Time,” which topped the Hot 100 for three weeks early in 1962. Later that year, Checker made it to #8 with “Let’s Twist Again,” a single written by Cameo-Parkway execs Kal Mann and Dave Appell that capitalized on a sort of instant nostalgia: “Let’s twist again, like we did last summer / Let’s twist again, like we did last year.”
The twist craze easily could’ve died down after “Let’s Twist Again,” but the dance took root in a place where nobody could’ve expected. Joseph DiNicola, an Italian kid from New Jersey, led a local nightclub act called Joey Dee and the Starliters. (Joe Pesci played in an early lineup of the band.) An agent caught a Starliters show in Lodi and offered them a gig at the Peppermint Lounge, a small Mafia-front bar on Forty-Fifth Street in Manhattan.
The Starliters became the Peppermint Lounge house band, and the club hired a publicist, who tipped off gossip columnists about the scene developing around the group’s performances. Writers like Cholly Knickerbocker wrote in breathless tones about the working-class kids who came to the Peppermint Lounge to do the twist, and slumming celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland came to the club to take in the scene for themselves. Those appearances led to more gossip columns, which led to bigger and more excited crowds. Soon, the Peppermint Lounge was a New York–society destination, and the twist went from a teenage fad to a glamorous, slightly forbidden adult pastime.
With the success of the Peppermint Lounge, other twisting clubs opened up in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Advertising his Harlem club, Smalls’ Paradise, for instance, NBA star Wilt Chamberlain said, “These white people come to twist. This is the best twist spot in town.” Chamberlain’s line illuminates one key aspect of the whole craze. It wasn’t just adults doing a teenage dance. It was also rich white people doing a dance that had its origins in the Black community. But white consumers were taking part in Black culture in ways that often didn’t advantage the Black creators of those sounds and dances.
Chubby Checker got paid, though. In 1961, as the twist revival continued, Thom McAn shoe stores started making a new line of shoes, Chubby Checker’s Twisters, and Checker advertised them on TV. He also licensed twisting hats and dance mats. In January 1962, Checker’s song “The Twist” returned to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks. It’s the only time a non-Christmas song has landed at #1 years apart. The second time that “The Twist” topped the charts, the song that knocked it off its perch was another twisting song: Joey Dee and the Starliters’ “Peppermint Twist—Part 1.” Around the same time, both Chubby Checker and Joey Dee starred in twist-themed B movies. Nineteen years before his Oscar-nominated turn in Raging Bull, a teenage Joe Pesci made his big-screen debut as one of the Peppermint Lounge twisters in the Joey Dee vehicle Hey, Let’s Twist!
Chubby Checker rode the twist wave as long as he could. Checker teamed up with Cameo-Parkway teen idol Bobby Rydell for the instructional song “Teach Me to Twist” and with sixteen-year-old singer Dee Dee Sharp on the #3 hit “Slow Twistin’.” Checker wasn’t the only one cashing in, either. Soul pioneer and former gospel great Sam Cooke had a #9 hit with “Twistin’ the Night Away.” The lo-fi R&B wailer Gary “U.S.” Bonds made the top 10 with two different twist songs, “Dear Lady Twist” and “Twist, Twist Senora.” Even the Isley Brothers’ classic “Twist and Shout,” famously covered by the Beatles a few years later, was originally intended as a cash-in on the craze—a twist-themed sequel to the Isleys’ breakthrough, the 1959 wedding-reception perennial “Shout.”
The popularity of “The Twist” led to a boom in dance-craze records, with American Bandstand showcasing both the dances and the songs that went with them. Chubby Checker’s “Slow Twistin’” collaborator, Dee Dee Sharp, made it to #2 with “Mashed Potato Time.” Sharp passed on recording “The Loco-Motion,” a dance track written by married couple Carole King and Gerry Goffin, so Eva Boyd, the couple’s teenage babysitter, recorded the song instead, taking it to 1 in the summer of 1962. That Halloween, Boris Karloff impersonator Bobby “Boris” Pickett reached #1 with the dancing-ghouls novelty “Monster Mash.” In that song, an irate Dracula pokes his head out of his coffin to ask, “Whatever happened to my Transylvania Twist?”
The twist, Transylvanian or otherwise, kept hold over the American cultural imagination for about two years, but its popularity inevitably faded. The dance had saturated American life to the point where the Peppermint Lounge hired a dance troupe and rebranded itself as a tourist trap. By May 1962, the twist was so omnipresent that former president Dwight Eisenhower cautioned against its popularity while speaking at the dedication of his presidential library: “I have no objection to the twist as such, but it does represent some kind of change in our standards.” When a former president is using a teenage fad as a symbol for what’s wrong with America, it’s a pretty good sign that the fad has run its course.
Chubby Checker’s career never quite recovered after “The Twist” died down. Later in 1962, Checker had top-10 hits with follow-up dance-craze records like “Limbo Rock,” which peaked at #2, and “Popeye the Hitchhiker,” which made it to #9. But after his early-sixties heyday, Checker has returned to the top 20 only once: a 1988 remake of “The Twist,” recorded with joke-rap trio the Fat Boys, which reached #16.
Joey Dee and the Starliters broke up in 1962. A few years later, three former Starliters formed a new band, the Young Rascals, that played jangly R&B. Their cover of “Good Lovin’,” a doo-wop song from the Black Los Angeles group the Olympics, hit #1 in 1966. As the sixties progressed, the band moved toward an easy-listening folk-rock sound, scored two more #1 hits, and dropped the “Young” from their group name. Hank Ballard’s Midnighters broke up in 1965. Ballard went solo, but he scored only a few minor R&B hits in the years after. James Brown, who’d been massively influenced by Ballard, produced a few of those singles in the sixties and seventies. Ballard died of throat cancer in 2003.
In recent years, Chubby Checker has been lobbying the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to induct him, arguing that he was “the Beatles before the Beatles.” Thus far, the campaign has had no success. (Another member of Chubby Checker’s family has had better luck with recognition; his daughter Mistie Bass won a WNBA championship with the Phoenix Mercury in 2014.) Joey Dee’s not in the Hall of Fame, either, but the (Young) Rascals made the cut in 1997. Hank Ballard, meanwhile, was inducted in 1990, and the other Midnighters joined in 2002.
“The Twist”—both the song and the dance—is generally remembered as a flash-in-the-pan fad. But pop music history is built on flash-in-the-pan fads. Dance-craze records have never really left the charts in the years since “The Twist,” and many of those records—Van McCoy and the Soul City Symphony’s “The Hustle,” Madonna’s “Vogue,” Los del Río’s “The Macarena,” Soulja Boy’s “Crank That (Soulja Boy)”—have reached #1. As communications technology has evolved, teenagers have used that technology to show off their dances. In 1960, American Bandstand served that function. Today, dance crazes make their way out into the world as TikTok challenges. The medium has changed, but the basic urge behind it has not.
“The Twist” came along at a moment when rock ’n’ roll was moving into a new era. Most of the genre’s original stars were drafted, disgraced, or dead. The excitement behind the original explosion had died down, but its effects remained. This is when sales of 45-RPM singles had almost doubled, and America’s baby-boomer teenagers had billions of dollars to spend. Businessmen like Dick Clark recognized that demand, and they found ways to supply it. TV shows like American Bandstand and record labels like Cameo-Parkway cashed in on rock ’n’ roll, and they also tamed and professionalized it. But even in watered down form, a song like “The Twist” had ripple effects that nobody could have foreseen.
“The Twist” crossed lines with unprecedented speed. In its two-year life span, the song and its attendant dance went from a Black teenage regional blip to a global phenomenon that captured the imaginations of people of all ages, races, and classes. Most of the people who benefited from this phenomenon were profiteers, not artists. But “The Twist” was also a cultural unifier—a song that got all kinds of people out on the floor at the same time. That’s the kind of magic trick that only pop music can pull off.
