With Just A Hint Of Amelia

Amelia (and obviously anyone else who is reading this post) are you all sitting comfortably again? Did you enjoy last months story? Ok then let’s begin another story about some wonderful (and possibly not so wonderful) music. Growing up is full of lessons, some you remember and some you forget. One of the ones that many people don’t forget is what their first dance craze was. Mine was probably the Twist, but it could so easily have been the Hucklebuck or the Mashed Potato. They were in the 60s and later the 70s brought us the Funky Chicken, the Funky Penguin, the Soul City Walk and the Hustle along with many others. I can also claim the honour of not only seeing your Granddad perform the Hustle but also teaching him the steps. I’ll let you into a little secret though, I made those steps up!There was also the Bump, which I won’t go into here, but Amelia you really should talk to your Mummy about a song called “The Bump” by Kenny. It’s a song that your Mummy loves, but it really isn’t very good and I think only you can convince her that her taste in 70s dance craze songs is not very good. We don’t want her damaging the reputation of the Kingdom of Godderwil do we?

So let’s get back to some good dance craze songs and for today’s story we will focus on the Twist, but I think we will come back to some of the others one day. Let’s begin with “The Twist” which is very old, in fact as old as Uncle Bill. It was originally recorded by Hank Ballard as a B Side of “Teardrops On Your Letter” in 1959 and was a hit in the USA. It became really popular back in 1961 and was one of the first popular dances that you could do on your own. Strangely the song itself was never a big hit in the UK, although Chubby Checker’s “Let’s Twist Again” was a big hit, reaching number 1 in the UK and number 8 in the USA. The Faerie folk of Forest Rise tell me that it also reached the top twenty in Godderwil too. Chubby went on to have a whole range of Twist related hits, including; “Slow Twisting” (with Dee Sharp), “Twistin’ USA”, “Twist It Up” and a revamp of the Twist recorded with the Fat Boys in 1988 which was called “The Twist (Yo Twist)” Chubby’s real name was Ernest Evans, can you guess why he was called Chubby? Well it wasn’t really because he was fat. It was a play on words from the name of the great Fats Domino who was popular at the time. They replaced Fats with Chubby and added another popular game as a surname; Checkers as opposed to Dominoes. But if Chubby had been given his name on this side of the big pond he would be known as Chubby Draughts.

There are also some other excellent Twist related songs which you can listen to and shake your hips to as well. There’s “Twist And Shout” by the Beatles, which was originally recorded by the Isley Brothers (not a lot of people know that), “Twisting The Night Away” by the late, great Sam Cooke and an excellent more modern twisting song from the 80s, Dire Straits “Twisting By The Pool”

Now you can test your twisting skills by dancing to some of those twisting songs;

Amelia which is your favourite twisting song? Mine is “Twisting The Night Away” by Sam Cooke