A brief history of "The Twist"

YouTube link.

Excerpts from an article at The Guardian celebrating the 50-year anniversary of the appearance of the dance:

The absence of body contact is significant. Rather than going through a set of predetermined steps, you are free to use dancing as a means of self-expression, of doing your own thing, though that phrase will not come into use until the 60s have become fully swinging. It is a narcissistic dance, but it also gives you the chance to watch your partner's moves, and read their intentions. And since you are not physically attached to your partner, there is nothing to stop you drifting away to dance with someone else who has caught your eye (of course, you can also have that humiliation visited upon you, and find yourself dancing alone). Finally, there is no leader: here is the first dance in which the genders are created equal...

No one knows how the Twist began. The word was used in connection with dancing in a number of songs during the first half of the 20th century, but the song itself seems to have been written, in its first form, in 1957 by Brother Joseph Wallace of the Sensational Nightingales, a prominent gospel group. Its profoundly secular nature prevented him performing it himself, but when the Nightingales found themselves sharing a Florida hotel with the popular (and very secular) Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, Wallace offered them his song...

King Records' boss was Syd Nathan, an archetypal cigar-chomping philistine who liked the Twist so little that it first saw the light of day, in January 1959, as the B-side of a ballad called Teardrops On Your Letter, which edged its way into the Top 100... This was quickly spotted by Philadelphia-based disc jockey Dick Clark, who already had a national following for his own TV show, American Bandstand... it would be a good idea to record a cover version of this new song, to feature on his show. Lowe selected one of his contracted artists, a cheerful, good-looking, puppy-fattish 19-year-old called Ernest Evans whose professional name, Chubby Checker, paid homage to Fats Domino... Chubby Checker and the Twist were duly given their first national exposure in August 1960 to the broader audience offered by Clark's Saturday night show, broadcast from New York...

On West 45th Street in midtown Manhattan, a small nightclub called the Peppermint Lounge was setting aside its past as a sleazy leather bar... it had acquired as resident band a young New Jersey group called Joey Dee and the Starliters. They were joined on stage by three teenage girls from Spanish Harlem who had turned up at the club one night in high bouffant hairdos, lavish mascara and matching frocks, with Kleenex stuffed in their bras, and were given a job as the world's first go-go dancers. Later they would become known as the Ronettes...

Within weeks, Joey Dee and the Starliters were not only topping the charts with Peppermint Twist but entertaining Manhattan's social elite at a charity ball in the Plaza hotel and a party at the Museum of Modern Art. Jackie Kennedy, the epitome of the new carefree spirit of the post-Eisenhower era, did the Twist in a Capri nightspot... Arthur Murray, the dance teacher, added it to his curriculum, setting an example followed with some reluctance by Fred Astaire's nationwide chain of academies...

What the Twist had done, however, was create a powerful hunger among modernist youth for new dance crazes based on the template of dancing on the spot, with no contact. And so along came the Locomotion, the Fly, the Madison, the Hitch Hike, the Watusi, the Hully Gully, the Frug, the Stroll, the Monkey, the Dog, the Mashed Potato and countless others...

And re the embedded video:

Clips include the following actors and actresses dancing to The Twist: Route 66 (Julie Newmar), Pulp Fiction (Uma Thurman, John Travolta), Spiderman 3 (Kirsten Dunst, James Franco), Leave it to Beaver (Jerry Mathers), Mad Men and Ferris Bueller's Day Off (Matthew Broderick).