Twist (dance)

From 1959 to the early sixties it became a worldwide dance craze, enjoying immense popularity while drawing controversies from critics who felt it was too provocative.

[1][2] Dick Clark, having noticed the dance becoming popular among teenagers, recommended to Cameo Records that the more wholesome Chubby Checker rerecord the song, which was released in 1959 and became a number one hit in 1960.

[1][2] A world record was set in DeLand, Florida, on October 11, 2012, when Chubby Checker sang the song live and the crowd danced.

The upper body sways forward and backward and the hips and shoulders twirl erotically, while the arms thrust in, out, up and down with the pistonlike motions of baffled bird keepers fighting off a flock of attack blue jays.

[6] One of the hit songs of early blackface minstrelsy was banjo player Joel Walker Sweeney's "Vine Twist".

Blues singer Bo Carter recorded "Twist It Babe" in 1931, the reference in the lyrics apparently being a metaphor for sex.

In the 1953 song "Let the Boogie Woogie 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 originates in the late fifties among teenagers, and was popularized by 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.

In 1961, at the height of the craze, patrons at New York City's Peppermint Lounge on West 45th Street were twisting to the house band, a local group from New Jersey, Joey Dee and the Starliters.

It was also mentioned in the Amazing Spider-Man issue number 2, where Jameson tells Peter Parker to buy "twist records" with his money.

The craze was even referenced by the United States Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) when actions in 1961 were dubbed "Operation Twist".

The dance would come to be seen as emblematic of the early 1960s in later years, with popular songs, television shows, and movies likely to reference it when they wanted to convey the spirit of that time period.

In a Season One episode of Mad Men ("The Hobo Code"), Peggy Olsson and several other employees of Sterling Cooper dance to Chubby Checker's "The Twist".

In 2009 a version of the Twist was performed by Lady Gaga and her backup dancers in the official video for the song "Bad Romance".