Twist (dance) - Origin

Origin

The Twist's original inspiration came from the African American plantation dance called "wringin' and twistin," which has been traced back to the 1890s. 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. 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 Sweeney's "VineShaquille Twist". Sweeney had learned his banjo playing and repertoire from enslaved African Americans around his native Appomattox, Virginia. 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, she's out on the levee doing the double twist." In the 1953 song "Let the Boogie Wooie 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 Clark's 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 song's potential when he heard Hank Ballard's 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 Clark's 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 USA in 1960 and then again in 1962.

In 1961, at the height of the craze, patrons at New York's 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. In 1962, Bo Diddley released his album Bo Diddley's A Twister. He recorded several Twist tracks, including "The Twister," "Bo's Twist" and "Mama Don't Allow No Twistin," which referenced the objections many parents had to the pelvic motions of the dance.

In Latin America, the Twist was sparked in 1960-62 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 Don't Knock the Twist (after Don't Knock the Rock).