The song reached no 16 on Billboard’s rhythm and blues chart, and caught the attention of Dick Clark, a broadcasting personality who hosted popular TV music shows including ABC’s The Dick Clark Show. As a clean-cut figure with a prime time Saturday night slot, Clark helped bring rock ‘n’ roll to the masses – but Hank Ballard and the Midnighters had a reputation for pushing boundaries, and weren’t felt to be suitable for the show. So Clark sought an alternative musician to record the song, settling on an up-and-coming young singer named Chubby Checker. 

 

Checker had already had some success with his first release, a novelty song called ‘The Class’ in the spring of 1959. But his version of ‘The Twist’ – a faithful cover of the original – became a nationwide sensation as a result of his performance on Clark’s show in August 1960. That performance also included a spirited demonstration of the dance, which was soon being copied on dancefloors across the US and overseas. 

Its popularity may have been linked to the ease with which people could copy it: most people could ‘do the twist’ to almost any song without difficulty and, crucially, without embarrassing themselves. This didn’t meant it was immune from controversy, and the dance drew criticism from some who felt its movements were too suggestive. Over time, however, it grew to be widely accepted. 

Of course the twist is far from the only dance to have been popularised by a song. In some cases, as with ‘The Twist’, these songs shone a spotlight on dances that were already a fixture in particular subcultures, bringing them into mainstream culture. At other times, writers have used their songs to create and spread a new type of dance. 

James Brown used popular dance steps in his infamously energetic concerts, including the ‘mashed potato’, which he popularised with records such as ‘(Do the) Mashed Potatoes’ and ‘Mashed Potatoes USA’. Meanwhile Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett’s novelty hit ‘Monster Mash’ inspired people to add onto the dance by making monster-style gestures with their arms. 

 

The ‘funky chicken’ dance, which was linked to Rufus Thomas’ record ‘Do the Funky Chicken’, was described by one reviewer as ‘the single goofiest dance craze of the 1970s’. As videos from the time show, the dance was a hit with audiences. 

The 70s also saw Van McCoy and the Soul City Symphony’s ‘The Hustle’, named after the Latin Hustle dance that began in the South Bronx – although the term became more commonly used as a catch-all name for disco dance moves that were popular at the time. 

 

And in 1990, Madonna took inspiration from voguing, the highly stylised dance trend created by Black and Latino LGBTQ communities in Harlem, for her record ‘Vogue’. The music video featured dancers who were prominent members of the voguing scene, and was credited with bringing voguing into the mainstream. 

More recently, the internet has allowed dance crazes to take on a life of their own. The ‘floss’ became widely known when teenager Russell Horning, known as ‘the backpack kid’, performed the dance in a video that went viral in the summer of 2016. The following year Horning was invited to take part in Katy Perry’s live performance of ‘Swish Swish’ on the US TV programme Saturday Night Live, cementing the dance as a mainstay of popular culture at the time. 

Whether a dance is inspired by a song or the other way around, music and dance certainly belong together. The proliferation of such dance crazes only goes to show that music has the enduring ability to move people not just emotionally, but physically – and we at The Music Workshop Company think that is something to be celebrated! 

Learn more about ‘The Twist’ at: thoughtco.com/the-twist-dance-craze-1779369 

 

For an explainer on how to do the twist, visit stilemillelire.com/what-is-the-twist-dance/ 

 

Find more on the history of voguing at the National Museum of African American History & Culture: nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/brief-history-voguing