Donald Ellis asked me to sing The Twist. So here it is Donald. The twist is a dance that was inspired by rock and roll music. It became the first worldwide dance craze in the late 1950s, enjoying immense popularity among young people and drawing fire from critics who felt it was too provocative. It inspired dances such as the Jerk, the Pony, the Watusi, the Mashed Potato, the Monkey, and the Funky Chicken, but none were as popular. The dance was inspired by The Twist, Chubby Checkers 1960 cover of the B-side of Hank Ballard and The Midnighters 1959 single, Teardrops on Your Letter. A world record was set in DeLand, Florida, on October 11, 2012, when Chubby Checker sang the song live and the crowd danced. An estimated 4,000 people twisted along with Checker, surpassing the previous Guinness World Record record for most people twisting in the streets at once.The twist is performed by standing with the feet approximately shoulder width apart. The torso may be squared to the knees and hips, or turned at an angle so one foot is farther forward than the other. The arms are held out from the body, bent at the elbow. The hips, torso, and legs rotate on the balls of the feet as a single unit, with the arms staying more or less stationary. The feet grind back and forth on the floor, and the dance can be varied in speed, intensity, and vertical height as necessary. Occasionally one leg is lifted off the floor for styling, but generally the dance posture is low and with the feet in contact with the floor with very little vertical motion. The Twists original inspiration came from the African American plantation dance called wringin and twistin’, which has been traced back to the 1890s.[citation needed] However, its original aesthetic origins, such as the use of pelvic movement and the shuffling foot movement, can be traced all the way back to West Africa.[citation needed] Throughout the 20th century, the dance evolved until emerging to a mass audience in the 1960s. The use of the name twist for dancing goes back to the nineteenth century. According to Marshall and Jean Stearns in Jazz Dance, a pelvic dance motion called the twist came to America from the Congo during slavery. One of the hit songs of early blackface minstrelsy was banjo player Joel Walker Sweeneys Vine Twist. One of the early black dance crazes of the early twentieth century was the Mess Around, described by songwriter Perry Bradford in his 1912 hit Messin Around as: Now anybody can learn the knack, put your hands on your hips and bend your back; stand in one spot nice and tight, and twist around, twist around with all of your might. But the twist at this point was basically grinding the hips. In his Winin Boy Blues in the late 1930s, Jelly Roll Morton sang, Mama, mama, look at sis, shes out on the levee doing the double twist. In the 1953 song Let the Boogie Woogie Roll, Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters sang, When she looked at me her eyes just shined like gold, and when she did the twist she bopped me to my soul. But the simple dance that we now know as the Twist seems to have come from Chubby Checker in his preparation to debut the song to a national audience on August 6, 1960, on The Dick Clark Show, a Saturday night program that, unlike disc jockey Clarks daytime American Bandstand, was a stage show with a sitting audience. Dick Clark was a powerhouse in music at the time, thanks to American Bandstand, which ran five times a week in the afternoons, showcasing local dancers and visiting performers who lip-synched along with their recordings. Clark saw the songs potential when he heard Hank Ballards original version, but Ballard and his group, whose greatest hit had been Work With Me Annie in 1954, was considered too raunchy to appeal to Clarks teenage audience. He urged Philadelphia record label Cameo/Parkway to record a new version of “The Twist” with young, wholesome Chubby Checker, who had displayed his talent for copying other artists on an earlier novelty hit “The Class”. Released in summer 1960, Checker’s rendition of “The Twist” became number one on the singles chart in the United States in 1960 and then again in 1962. In 1961, at the height of the craze, patrons at New Yorks Peppermint Lounge on West 45th Street were twisting to the house band, a local group from Jersey, Joey Dee and the Starliters. Their song, The Peppermint Twist (Part 1) became number one in the United States for three weeks in January 1962.[2] In 1962 Bo Diddley released his album Bo Diddleys A Twister. He recorded several Twist tracks, including The Twister, Bos Twist, and Mama Dont Allow No Twistin, which referenced the objections many parents had to the pelvic motions of the dance. In Latin America, the twist caught fire in the early 1960s, fueled by Bill Haley & His Comets. Their recordings of The Spanish Twist and Florida Twist were successes, particularly in Mexico. Haley, in interviews, credited Checker and Ballard. Coincidentally, Checker appeared in two musicals that took their titles from films Haley made in the 1950s: Twist Around the Clock (after Rock Around the Clock) and Dont Knock the Twist (after Dont Knock the Rock).
Posted on: Mon, 01 Sep 2014 08:59:39 +0000
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