That’s A Cover? explores cover songs that you may have thought were originals.
Hank Ballard and the Midnighters have a solid claim to shaping rock ‘n’ roll music; their song “Work With Me Annie” was a number one R&B hit in 1954. The bawdy lyrics (“Annie, please don’t cheat / Give me all my meat”) led to the song being banned on many radio stations, and a disgusted Dick Clark refused to play it on American Bandstand. But the people who heard it loved it so much that when one DJ joked that there was a sequel called “Annie Had a Baby,” orders poured in for it. The Midnighters obliged with a by-the-numbers song with that title, which went on to sell a million copies and spawned more answer records – “Annie Get Your Yo-Yo,” “Annie Pulled a Humbug” (“That’s not MY kid!”), and “Annie Kicked the Bucket,” to name just a few.
But that was 1954. By 1958, the hits had dried up, and Federal Records dropped the group. Ballard began shopping for a new label, using as bait a demo of a song he wrote called “The Twist.” There are multiple stories for what inspired it – teenagers dancing in Tampa, the Midnighters goofing around onstage. Whatever the inspiration, it led to Ballard writing it up in 20 minutes.
Ballard knew “The Twist” was a potential smash hit. When King Records (Federal Records’ parent company) exercised their option to pick the Midnighters up, Ballard tried to convince Syd Nathan, King’s president, to put it out as the A-side of a single. But Nathan disagreed, and stuck it on the B-side of “Teardrops on Your Letter” — written, in an unbelievable coincidence, by Henry Glover, King’s vice president. “Teardrops” did well enough, but an undeterred Ballard pushed “The Twist” in concert, getting a positive response throughout the South.
“We were doing the Twist for approximately two years before it caught on,” Ballard would say later. When the Midnighters played in Baltimore’s Royal Theatre, some of the kids who attended took it to TV. The Buddy Deane Show, later immortalized in the John Waters movie Hairspray, was a local teen dance program which was at one time the most popular local show in the United States. Deane, blown away by the zeal the kids had for the song, got in touch with his rival Dick Clark. “They’re dancin’ and not even touchin’!” he said.
Clark, remembering Ballard’s risqué songs of the past, wasn’t interested, but a persistent Deane sent Clark a copy. Clark listened to it, liked what he heard, but still thought it too suggestive. He needed a more wholesome artist to put it across to the masses, and he knew just who to ask… Philadelphia’s own Danny and the Juniors. But when the band that brought us “At the Hop” didn’t come up with anything, Clark had another idea.
Clark had a good relationship with Cameo-Parkway, a local label with a strong roster of talented artists. If someone canceled on American Bandstand at the last minute, a Cameo-Parkway artist would be available to take their place. In 1958, Clark went to C-P to ask for a song he could send his friends as a holiday gift. Kal Mann, a C-P songwriter, and his friend Henry Colt, owner of Fresh Farm Poultry, brought in one of Colt’s workers, a cheery, wholesome, chicken-plucking teen named Ernest Evans who had a talent for imitating the hit singers of the day. He recorded a version of “Jingle Bells” with impressions of Elvis Presley and Fats Domino. In honor of Domino, Clark’s wife Barbara christened him Chubby Checker. As one writer said, “It could have been worse. She could have named him Tubby Tiddlywink or Pudgy Pawn.”
Mr. Checker signed with C-P and released a novelty song “The Class,” featuring him doing Presley, Domino, and the Coasters singing “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Then Clark came to him and asked him to cover “The Twist.” Checker did his best Ballard impression, cutting the track in three takes and 35 minutes. C-P released it; Clark played it on his shows, and the nation responded. Here’s Checker performing it on The Dick Clark Show.
“I thought it was me,” Hank Ballard said. He was floating in a Florida pool when he first heard the radio playing his – well, “his” – song. He continued, “I was sure it was me. I was wondering why they were playing it on the radio. I didn’t find out it wasn’t me until a few weeks later…. They did a pretty good job duplicating my record, man, note for note, gimmick for gimmick, phrase for phrase…. And I could have sworn it was me. That’s how close he came to my sound.”
Ballard was remarkably unbitter about the success Checker had with “The Twist,” saying that it was nice to see it get the promotion that his own label couldn’t or wouldn’t do. It may have helped that he wrote it, and therefore got a nice piece of change from it. His own recording didn’t do so bad either, making the top 10 in the R&B charts.
By 1961, the Twist was passé. The kids had moved on to different dances – among others, the Monkey, the Slop, the Pony, the Fly, and the Hucklebuck. Checker, who’d found quite the niche of performing songs about dances, had hits about those last three, and a fourth hit, “Let’s Twist Again,” joined the other Twist-based songs that followed in the smash hit’s wake. But the kids had stopped doing the dance. It was their parents who had picked it up.
The dance was easy to do – Checker famously described it as “pretend you’re wiping your bottom with a towel as you get out of the shower, while putting out a cigarette with both feet” – and people from Zsa Zsa Gabor to Sophia Loren to Audrey Hepburn to (gasp) Jackie Kennedy were twisting the night away. “It suddenly became socially acceptable for dancers to move their hips in public,” a Dick Clark biographer would later write. Ed Sullivan invited Checker to sing “The Twist” on his show in the fall of 1961. Cameo-Parkway re-released it soon after. The song climbed all the way back to number one, becoming the first and so far the only song to top the charts in nonconsecutive years.
Checker has been eligible for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame since the debut class of ’86. Ballard was elected in 1990. In 2002 Checker held a protest (which Newsday described as “good-natured”) outside the RRHOF ceremony, in part for his not getting in. In 2025, he’s finally getting his rightful spot in the pantheon. Still twisting at 84, he’ll be there to accept his better-late-than-never due.
Follow our complete Rock and Roll Hall of Fame series here! All week long we’ll be sharing covers by/of every artist inducted: Cyndi Lauper, Chubby Checker, Joe Cocker, The White Stripes, Salt n Pepa, Bad Company, Soundgarden, and Warren Zevon!
