‘The rhythm was popularized in mainstream dance music in the United States by a 1923 tune called “The Charleston” by composer/pianist James P. Johnson, which originated in the Broadway show Runnin’ Wild and became one of the most popular hits of the decade.’
It’s before my time, but in that era (late 50s-early 60s) there were lots of “named” dances, weren’t there (e.g. as referenced in “Land of a Thousand Dances”)? The Twist is, for some reason, the one everybody remembers.
…and then Chubby milked his hit for all it was worth by next year coming out with the song “Let’s Twist Again (Like We Did Last Summer)”
Let’s do that perennial favorite, “The Nitpick”!
Hank Ballard’s “The Twist” appeared no earlier than late December 1958 as a b-side to a minor song and on his June 1959 album Singin’ and Swingin’ (Sources disagree whether the single came out in 1958 or 1959 but a late December release could go either way.) Chubby Checker’s version hit number one in 1960. Nobody in the 1950s was Twisting faddily or enough to make jokes about.
And the Beatles weren’t satisfied with just twisting, they wanted the girls to Twist and Shout!
Also the Twist rose to number 1 on the charts again two years later along with other CC songs like Let’s Twist Again, Twisting USA and Slow Twisting. That man made a quite a good living twisting. And he did numerous other dance tunes such as Pony Time, Dance the Mess Around, the Fly and Limbo Rock. A dancing fool he was.
Jeez, it’s so painfully obvious when you put it like that, but I admit I never made that connection. Of course, I’m not a huge fan of either of them.
Chubby hated the name, from what I’ve read. Would he have been as successful as Chubby Evans? Maybe not in 1960.
I’m pretty sure I knew about both of them for years before I made the connection.
So, those of you who have twisted, was it a rite of passage? Was it an act of defiance? Is it something you remember fondly?
It was just a fun way to dance. I remember it fondly when I was just old enough to be dancing at parties with girls before it disappeared and dancing turned weird.
It was just a dance move. Nothing more, nothing less.
It did start a trend of songs about dances: The Mashed Potatoes, The Horse, the Loco-Motion, the Monster Mash, . …
I was listening to AM radio then, and after the twist there was a record about a new song just about every week, including Monster Mash. I took dance lessons in 1964 in preparation for my bar mitzvah party, and the advantage of the Twist is that it was easy to do and you didn’t actually have to touch the girl to dance.
Any sexual connotations were way over my head at the time, as it were. By 1964 it was not at all scandalous.
You didn’t move your feet to Twist. That meant that anybody at all could do it even if they couldn’t dance a step if their feet needed to move. It was the perfect dance for non-dancers. Little wonder everybody in the country adopted it, down to pre-teens.
Eh, the Twist is yesterday’s news.
All the kids today are doing the Twizzle.
mmm
I’m reminded of how they call out the steps in square dancing.
I was just about to post that and noticed this bit from the Wikipedia entry (bolding mine):
In the early 1800s, English country dances merged with French dances to form the quadrille, a dance for four couples in a square. These dances further evolved in America, where they arrived with European settlers. After the American Revolution, the quadrille became especially popular. Quadrilles were originally danced from memorized steps and sequences, but as African American slaves played music for the dances, they began calling out the steps. This practice became common by the early 1900s and gave rise to the modern caller.
Not supposed to be a serious thread, so say anything. 
And just when the original song was fading away in people’s memories, Dire Straits came up with this song, which had many a sad and daggy parent up and dancing.
It’s real significance is that it was one of the few artforms from teen culture to be embraced by adults.
And ironically, at least for me as someone who was born six years after the Twist craze, “Let’s Twist Again” is the song I’ve heard many times more often than “The Twist”.
ETA: even Sam Cooke jumped on the Twist bandwagon with “Twistin’ The Night Away”.
I remember us kids trying to teach my dad how to do the Twist by having him pretend to dry his back with an imaginary towel. He never did get the hang of it. He loved the record, though.
Not your back, your butt! You learned it by pretending to dry your ass with an imaginary towel. (That Murray video deconstructing the thing was hilarious. Hilarious because, no matter how right he wound up getting the movement, he was coming at it in such an uptight fashion, exactly the reverse of the whole idea.)
– I remember, dimly, my sister trying to teach me to twist. I would have been 9 in 1960 and she would have been 18.
I also remember its being considered slightly shocking at the time.