Killer Joe Piro

Frank "Killer Joe" Piro (2 March 1921 – 5 February 1989) was an American dance instructor to high society who popularized steps of the discotheque era of the 1960s and 1970s.

[2] While serving with the US Navy in World War II, he won a National Jitterbug contest held at the 1942 Harvest Moon Ball,[3] and earned a transfer to Broadway's equivalent of the Hollywood Canteen, where he strutted his stuff with Kathryn Cornell and other stage stars.

Invariably keeping a step ahead of trends, over the decades he taught what would become the mainstays of the discothèque scene: the Mambo, the Cha-cha and the Merengue, then the Twist and later the Frug, the Frog, the Watusi, and the Hully Gully.

His students included the Duke of Windsor, Sita Devi Gaekwar - Maharani of Baroda, Dame Margot Fonteyn, Ray Bolger, Luci Baines Johnson, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and, by 1965, more than a million other Americans, according to an obituary in The New York Times.

Piro was a guest on the February 16, 1965, edition of the satirical NBC-TV program, That Was The Week That Was, where he and the show's singer, Nancy Ames, demonstrated some of the latest dance steps.

Record labels feverishly rushed out whole albums of music to monkey or limbo by, or else mimicked the discothèque effect by assembling compilations of everything from the foxtrot to the boogaloo.

The LP served as an instructional dance record and repackaged hits by Ray Charles, The Clovers, and other mainstays of Atlantic's R&B back catalog.

[4] The session musicians included King Curtis, Tate Houston, Cornell Dupree, Eric Gale and Chuck Rainey.