![]() The Midnighters were dancing around him, in a circle. ![]() "I saw Hank Ballard and his band perform that song when I was a kid. "The twist was a dance the black kids made up to the lyrics of Hank Ballard's song, not the other way around,'' he says in an e-mail. He's adamant that the screwy little swivel and accompanying arm jive did not originate with Ballard, or in Tampa, for that matter. Maybe it was the Jackson House on Zack Street where Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald and so many other black musicians and Negro League baseball players stayed, when white hotels were off-limits. The liner notes to the compilation album 1960: Still Rockin' tell the same story: Ballard wrote the song "after seeing kids do the pelvis-swiveling maneuver in Tampa, Florida.'' Some say Ballard saw those twisters - it's usually girls - out on the street, stepping out of his hotel. ![]() In the late 1950s the Midnighters might have been playing the Cotton Club, the Apollo Ballroom, the Little Savoy or any of the other venues along Central Avenue, then the Harlem of Tampa. "What's that they're doing?" She said, "That's the twist." Pushed his way up through the crowd to the very first row.Ī little girl in a red dress recognized the vocalist, he asked her, Hank Ballard came through Tampa on a chitlin' circuit show, ![]() It's an urban legend, and, to those who know it and buy it, a fervent claim to fame.Įlliott half-sings, half-talks the tale this way, in his "hillbilly blues'' style: There's far better reason to commemorate The Twist's 50th here in Tampa Bay, and Ronny Elliott lays it out in the title of one of his songs: In the early 1960s, everybody was doing a hip-turning shimmy-shake that Checker said went like this: "Just pretend you're wiping your bottom with a towel as you get out of the shower and putting out a cigarette with both feet.''īut we're not here to celebrate Checker and Clark, whose idea it was to cover Ballard's tune. Twist-o-mania began with urban black kids, and suddenly even first lady Jacqueline Kennedy was twisting in the White House (though the press secretary denied it). The dance is what did it, though, what made The Twist a social phenomenon and an American classic. In 2008, Billboard declared Checker's Twist the most popular song of the past 50 years. Slews of twist songs - Twistin' the Night Away by Sam Cooke Twist and Shout by the Isley Brothers and then the Beatles - became hits as well. It would become only the second song to ever hit No. ![]() galactic.įifty years ago this month, that simple two-and-a-half-minute song hit No. Gaining momentum from airplay on Dick Clark's American Bandstand, this second Twist, a word-for-word, note-for-note cover, went. While it was still on the charts, Chubby Checker, an 18-year-old from Philadelphia, released his version of The Twist on hometown label Cameo Parkway. Ballard's version, released in 1959, got to No. That may be the best rock 'n' roll performance I've ever seen.'' This from a 40-year music veteran who has shared bills with Jimi Hendrix, the Allman Brothers, Chuck Berry and Van Morrison.īy the time of the Armory show, The Twist had already become a monster hit - for another man. "I see them dancing like nothing I've ever seen and doing this wonderful singing, too. "I see grown men having more fun than I knew you could have,'' remembers Elliott, 63. ![]()
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