Chubby Checker’s Latest Twist: He’s in the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame
Talk show host Bill Maher likes to veer into pop culture, among other things, and a couple of shows ago he laid off Donald Trump long enough to joke about Chubby Checker.
Noting that Mr. Checker had just been confirmed as a 2025 inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Maher cracked that the Hall now owes an apology to every uninducted artist who basically had only one song.
Checker’s one song was “The Twist,” which became a №1 hit twice, in 1960 and 1962, sparking and then riding the wave of a national dance craze.
As Maher noted, Checker recorded multiple twist songs, including “Twistin’ USA,” “Slow Twistin’,” “Twist It Up” and “Let’s Twist Again,” enough of which did well to make him one of the most successful artists of the ’60s. He placed 14 records in the national top 20, and “The Twist” remains the only non-Christmas record in the history of popular music charts to have ascended to №1 twice.
Maher wasn’t suggesting Checker was a one-hit wonder as much as a one-trick pony, which is amusing because Checker’s recording of “Pony Time” also reached №1. His “trick,” if you will, was dance songs, including the Fly, the Mess Around, the Slop, the Mess Around, the Popeye and many more.
No other artist had as many hit dance songs as Chubby Checker, and while that might sound like a modest achievement, it’s really just the headline for a complicated career that says a whole lot about popular music and the multi-edged sword of popular music success.
In a 1985 interview, around the 25th anniversary of “The Twist,” Checker reflected on the song’s legacy with what sure sounded like fondness.
“With me and the Twist,” he said, “rock ’n’ roll finally got its own dance. Elvis and the others before me were borrowing from old dances.”
At the same time, he said, triggering a national cultural phenomenon came at a cost. “The Twist screwed me up,” he said. “It took me years to become as popular as that dance made my name.”
Fast-forward 40 years, to 2025, and Chubby Checker, now age 83, is still on the road — though less often — singing “The Twist” and “Let’s Twist Again.” And “Slow Twistin’.” And “Twist It Up.” Plus a couple of twist songs popularized by other artists: Joey Dee’s “The Peppermint Twist” and the Isley Brothers’s “Twist and Shout.”
In his concerts today, Checker intersperses twist songs with some of his non-dance recordings, including “Good Good Loving” and “Loddy Lo,” as well as some early rock ’n’ roll classics like “Blueberry Hill,” “Peggy Sue,” “Little Bitty Pretty One” and “Whole Lotta Shaking Goin’ On.”
In fact, it was those foundational 1950s rock ’n’ roll songs that got Ernest Evans, a kid raised by his parents in the projects of South Philadelphia, into the music game in the first place.
He was 11 when he formed his first harmony group, and he developed a talent for imitating the popular artists of early rock ’n’ roll, including Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly and Fats Domino, from whom he took his stage name (Fats Domino, Chubby Checker, get it?).
His first record, “The Class,” was a novelty tune in which he imitated familiar artists singing “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” An abbreviated version of a more extensive production he did as a live act, it reached №38 on the Billboard chart in 1959.
Where most imitation records of the 1950s were either goofy (“The Flying Saucer”) or dismissive (Steve Allen, Stan Freberg), “The Class” was reverential.
“Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee, Buddy Holly — they were the best people who ever sang rock ’n’ roll,” Checker said in 1985.
He admired them so much he developed a kind of pioneer tribute act, which he planned to take to nightclubs.
“We had club bookings for a tour with artists like Clyde McPhatter,” he said. “It was a nice plan” that was presumed to have a finite lifespan.
“We didn’t know rock ’n’ roll was here to stay,” he said. He had no idea he would still be singing it in 1985, never mind 2025, and if he had, it might not have been an entirely pleasant premonition.
He prefaced the 1985 interview by noting he had just pulled into Rockford, Illinois, for a one-night stand. He didn’t sound like he was in love with living that way.
“The road is like anything else,” he said. “It’s one of the things you have to do. There are dues that have to be paid. But I chose this profession.”
It’s a profession that comes with curveballs as well, and the big one for Checker was “The Twist,” which had first been recorded in 1958 as the B-side of the modestly successful ballad “Teardrops on Your Letter” by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, one of those early vocal groups Ernest Evans loved.
Checker sang “The Twist” pretty much exactly as Hank Ballard had sung it. “When I first heard Chubby’s version on the radio,” Ballard said years later, “I thought it was me. It was that close.”
Checker sang it on American Bandstand on August 6, 1960, and on September 19, it displaced Elvis’s “It’s Now Or Never” as the №1 record in the country. It only stayed there one week before it yielded to “My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own” by Connie Francis, but the seed had taken. Within months, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy was throwing twist parties in the White House.
That hostess and that venue caught our attention — it wasn’t the kind of thing Mamie Eisenhower would have done — but it’s no surprise at all that contemporary popular music would intertwine with dance.
Mozart didn’t write minuets so he could be studied 300 years later in conservatories. He wrote them because minuets were a dance craze for 18th century Europeans. In more recent times, popular songs provided the rhythm and the beat for every dance from cakewalks to the Charleston to the Black Bottom to the Lindy Hop to the waltz, the cha-cha and the mambo.
It’s hardly accidental that one of the most prominent national platforms for early rock ’n’ roll was Bandstand, where Dick Clark played records and a couple of dozen Philadelphia teenagers danced. It became a national pop culture cliché that when one of the kids was asked to rate a record, he or she would say, “I give it an 83. It’s got a good beat and you can dance to it.”
This perpetuated the tradition of, say, Fred Astaire or the Nicholas Brothers. Was anything classier than Fred and Ginger Rogers gliding around the floor on roller skates while he sings “Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off”? Was anything more breathtaking than Fayard and Harold Nicholas lighting up a nightclub after Cab Calloway’s band swaggered through “The Jumpin’ Jive”?
The correct answer in both cases is no.
Getting back to Chubby Checker, then, the idea that dance music is somehow a lesser form of popular music is just historically wrong.
But to the extent dance music is at times denigrated, consider one word. Disco.
Disco had the kind of popular dance-world impact in the late ’70s that the Twist had in the early 1960s, with one major difference: Disco music itself was widely scorned by music fans. It all sounded the same, the notion went, just a soulless machine-generated robo-beat. After the Bee Gees sang the incredibly successful soundtrack to the defining dance movie of the disco era, Saturday Night Fever, they spent the next decade trying to convince anyone who listen that they were not a “disco band.”
It’s not wrong to say a lot of disco music sounded mechanical. But disco also gave us some pretty good records — think Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” — especially considering some of what preceded disco in 1970s popular music.
Chubby Checker in a way was collateral damage from disco. When he would have first been eligible for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in 1986, “dance music” was the last thing the Hall was inclined to honor, and that disinclination endured long after the Hall had inducted Elvis, Jerry Lee, Buddy, Chuck and all the other pioneers who first drew Ernest Evans to the music.
Some artists who were ignored by the Hall said who cared, they could keep their dumb old statuette. Not Chubby Checker. He picketed the Hall induction dinner in 2002 to protest his exclusion, which is consistent with his feeling years earlier that he deserved more respect.
“I want my music to be on the radio,” he said in 1985. “I want it so bad. I need it. I need it. I need it so bad.”
He was aware that second acts in popular music are uncommon. He was undeterred.
“I’ve got the talent,” he said. “I can sing and I can dance. I can’t get better than I am on stage. Look at Tina Turner. I bumped into her many times [in the years when neither had chart hits]. Then she got the right record.”
He knew the Twist put him in a box, partly because once he had dance hits, he was offered almost exclusively dance songs. “I haven’t always had great writing talent,” he said. “The record business is heartless.”
Still, success in that business provided some perks. If it weren’t for the Twist, it’s unlikely a kid from the South Philly projects would have met Catharina Lodders, who had recently been crowned Miss World 1962. In 1963 he recorded “Loddy Lo,” which is about her and is not a dance song. It peaked at №12 on the national charts. In April 1964 they were married. They are still married.
And Chubby Checker is still twisting. His website, chubbychecker.com, refers to “The Twist” as “The Number One Song Of All Time” and offers availability through the whimsically named bookings@thelasttwist.com. You can catch his show at the Des Plain Theater in Des Plaines, Illinois, on July 27.
As for Bill Maher’s tacit implication that Chubby Checker isn’t Hall of Fame material, there are two ways to look at that.
If a Hall of Fame is for elite players, like the Baseball Hall of Fame, no, he’s a good player who’s a little short of elite despite his vital and enduring contribution.
On the other hand, Chubby Checker left a bigger footprint on rock ’n’ roll than previous inductees like Journey, Foreigner, Bon Jovi or Duran Duran. Nothing against those artists or their fans, but if that’s where the bar is set, Chubby Checker belongs.
“The Twist,” he said in 1985, “was a great moment.”
