This year’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees have just been announced with Chubby Checker leading the pack. Checker, born Ernest Evans on October 3, 1941, will be just shy of his 84th birthday when the induction takes place in Los Angeles on later this year.
While he has been eligible for induction since the Hall of Fame’s 1986 inception, Checker was only included on the ballot as an official nominee this year. The legendary hitmaker and dance music pioneer has had 16 Top 20 singles on the Billboard charts, of which 8 went Top 10. He’s also had 8 Top 10 R&B singles and 15 Top 20 R&B singles. These, of course, include “The Twist,” a recording that catalyzed a massive cultural shift, the reverberations from which are still felt seven decades later. “The Twist,” in fact, reached #1 on two different occasions: first in August of 1960 and again 15 months later when it underwent an unprecedented resurgence that saw it yet again rise to the top. It was the first time a pop record had occupied the #1 slot in two different run-ups, a feat unequaled to this day. When Billboard compiled its list of “All-Time Hot 100 Top Songs” in the first 50 years of the Hot 100 Chart, “The Twist” by Chubby Checker was, yet again, #1. The record was added to the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress, and it was inducted into The Recording Academy’s Grammy Hall of Fame in 2000. Chubby Checker is a recipient of the Rhythm & Blues Foundation’s Pioneer Award.
ABKCO Records, steward of the Cameo-Parkway catalog, created a new music video for “The Twist” on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of its initial release.
Chubby Checker’s recording career has been marked by many successes beyond “The Twist,” epochal though it has been. His first foray into the studio came at the tail end of the 1950s when Philadelphia’s Cameo-Parkway Records released “The Class,” a single that broke into the Top 40 and featured Chubby’s vocal impressions of numerous hit artists of the period including Fats Domino, The Coasters, Elvis Presley and The Chipmunks. Following the success of “The Twist,” Checker’s focus was dance songs, the most successful of which were “Pony Time,” “The Fly,” “Limbo Rock,” “Slow Twistin’,” “Popeye (The Hitchhiker)” and, of course, “Let’s Twist Again.” Later recordings of his found resonance with the UK’s Northern Soul movement with collectors seeking out rare singles of his including “You Just Don’t Know (What You Do To Me).” That track is included in You Got The Power, a recent ABKCO album release.
Chubby Checker remains active as a touring artist, having just completed a run of US and Canadian dates last month. Thinking aerobically, he discussed his impact of his dance hits when “The Twist” was (literally) singled out by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for the institution’s Hall of Fame Singles category a few years ago, “These dances, in their original form, were very strenuous because of the fast beat of the music. Girls were sweating, ruining their hairdos, killing their make-up and so were the boys in their suits and ties. We realized that ‘The Twist,’ ‘The Pony,’ ‘The Fly’ and ‘The Shake’ were better than working out in the gym and, because of that, a new industry was born.”
