"The Twist" is an American pop song written and originally released in early 1959 by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters as a B-side to "Teardrops on Your Letter". Ballard's version was a moderate 1960 hit, peaking at number 28 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Chubby Checker's 1960 cover version of the song gave birth to the Twist dance craze. His single became a hit, reaching number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on September 19, 1960, where it stayed for one week, and setting a record as the only song to reach number 1 in two different hit parade runs when it resurfaced and topped the popular hit parade again for two weeks starting on January 13, 1962.

In 1988, "The Twist" again became popular due to a new recording of the song by The Fat Boys featuring Chubby Checker. This version reached number 2 in the United Kingdom and number 1 in Germany. In 2014, Billboard magazine declared the song the "biggest hit" of the 1960s.

Songs about doing the Twist went back to nineteenth-century minstrelsy, including "Grape Vine Twist" from around 1844. In 1938 Jelly Roll Morton, in "Winin' Boy Blues", sang, "Mama, mama, look at sis, she's out on the levee doing the double twist"—a reference to both sex and dancing in those days. As for this particular song, "The Twist", Hank Ballard's guitarist, Midnighters member Cal Green, said they picked up the general idea from Brother Joe Wallace of the gospel group The Sensational Nightingales, whose position and its associated image concerns prevented him from recording the song himself. Many years later, in an interview with Tom Meros that is currently available online, Midnighters' member Lawson Smith recalled the authorship of "The Twist" differently, that The Sensational Nightingales' Nathaniel Bills wrote the song instead. Green and Ballard already had written a song together called "Is Your Love for Real", which was based on Clyde McPhatter and The Drifters' 1955 song "What'cha Gonna Do", so they created an entirely new song by simply putting the new Twist words to the older melody. They originally recorded a loose version of the song in a Florida studio for Vee-Jay Records in early 1958, with slightly different lyrics, featuring Green on guitar playing like Jimmy Reed. This version appeared on the box set "The Vee-Jay Story" in 1993, but it went unreleased at the time. They did not get around to recording the released version until November 11, 1958, when the Midnighters were in Cincinnati. Ballard thought "The Twist" was the hit side, but King Records producer Henry Glover preferred the ballad "Teardrops on Your Letter", which he'd written himself.

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