A Twist of the Facts

Chubby Checker is still out there twisting, God bless him, but please don’t use his self-aggrandizing quotes as musical history (“Chubby Checker Still Enjoys Twistin’ the Night Away,” by Jeff Simons, Sept. 2).

“Since November 1959, the world has been dancing the style of Chubby Checker,” he claims, and yet Chubby didn’t record “The Twist” until June or July of 1960 and, as Simons pointed out, didn’t introduce the twist to the “world” on Dick Clark’s Saturday-night TV show until Aug. 6, 1960. (I use the word “introduce” even though Elvis did something very close to the twist while singing “You’re So Square (Baby, I Don’t Care)” in the film “Jailhouse Rock” three years earlier.)

Then Chubby says, “Dancing apart to the beat--before Chubby Checker--it did not exist.” Oh yeah? Check out those “American Bandstand” kinescopes circa 1957-58 with the teenagers dancing the bop, a vigorous, stand-apart dance that originated right here in Los Angeles and migrated to Philadelphia. Remember Gene Vincent’s “Dance to the Bop”? Wanda Jackson’s “Honey Bop”? Or Danny & the Juniors’ “Do the Bop”?--well, maybe not, because Clark convinced the group to go back and rerecord it as “At the Hop.”

Also, the original version of “Twist and Shout” by the Top Notes did not “score well on the charts.” In fact, it didn’t chart at all.

Finally, “The Twist” wasn’t “the only single to hit No. 1 on U.S. charts on two separate occasions.” You omitted the word “non-holiday”; Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” went to No. 1 on three separate occasions, in 1942, ’45 and ’46.

JIM DAWSON

Hollywood

Dawson is the author of “The Twist: The Story of the Song and Dance That Changed the World” (Faber & Faber, 1995).

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