The Twist made its debut on television in 1960 on American Bandstand, hosted by Dick Clark. Clark had first heard the song performed by the original writer and performer, Hank Ballard, a Black R&B singer known for sexually suggestive lyrics and danceable tracks. But when Clark encountered Ballard’s The Twist late in 1959, he found it to be too risqué for national television. According to Hour Detroit magazine, Clark never even considered making Ballard the face of The Twist. He regarded the streetwise R&B singer as “not the right kind of black man to be invited into America’s living rooms week after week.” Instead, Clark turned to Checker (born Ernest Evans), a 19-year-old Philadelphian with a lighter complexion, youthful smile, and baby-faced image who could perform a more wholesome version of the song.
What made Checker’s version of The Twist more palatable to white audiences was not just his pop-friendly demeanor, but also his ability to rechoreograph Black music, sanitizing it of its roots in African American social dance. From the bop to the lindy hop, Black dancers had long emphasized improvisation, rhythm, and pelvic articulation in both paired and solo forms. In its original expression, The Twist echoed blues and gospel traditions that included call-and-response, spiritual ecstasy, and full-body swinging and swaying.[3] Indeed, Hank Ballard’s original rendition of The Twist featured hip-centric, suggestive movements typical of Black juke joints and R&B clubs.
Checker, by contrast, used mundane imagery to describe the dance’s moves. “Drying the buttocks with an imaginary towel while grinding out an imaginary cigarette with one foot,” was one frequent descriptor of the dance.[4] Using even plainer language, Checker would instruct novices to “move the chest, hips, and arms from side to side and balance on the balls of the feet.”[5]
Despite Checker’s ability to subdue and normalize Ballard’s Twist for white audiences, the song created a moral panic, largely stemming from white fears of racial integration and sexual liberation. Leading voices in the U.S. medical profession sought to legitimize these fears by voicing concerns about the physical dangers of the dance, especially to white teens and adults.
When asked about the dance a couple years after its debut , a spokesperson for the AMA responded that it was “bad medicine for middle age, and it isn’t very good for youth, either.” Twist risks, the AMA reported, were quite high, leading to an increased incidence of “dislocated joints, slipped disc, sacroiliac damage [and] muscle strains.”[6]“It’s not a dance to be taken lightly,” said an orthopedic surgeon in 1962. He explained that one of his patients, a white fifteen year old, broke a steel rod surgically implanted along her spinal column to correct for scoliosis. “She was fine,” the treating orthopedist recounted, “until she did the twist.”[7]