The twist dance moved from Black culture into white elite society within two years

Evidence

Underrecognized as a product of Black culture was the hip-swiveling dance called the twist. Hank Ballard’s 1958 eponymous recording was inspired by the pelvic gyrations of some Tampa teenagers. Musicologists believe that the movement derives from a Congolese dance brought to America by enslaved Africans. Promoted by the Philadelphia TV show American Bandstand, Chubby Checker’s cover of the Ballard song ignited a summer of 1960 teenage craze. In the fall of 1961, the New York Times reported that “the elite of the social set and celebrities of show business have discovered a sensuous dance call the Twist, performed to rock ’n’ roll and are wallowing in it like converts to a new brand of voodoo.” The cult’s “high temple” was a mob-run sometime gay bar, the Peppermint Lounge on West Forty-Fifth Street off Seventh Avenue. By 1962, the twist was a worldwide sensation and early indicator of a revolution in cultural mores. Indeed, barely a month after the first Times piece, the newspaper reported a shocking outbreak of twisting at the Metropolitan Museum, during a fashion industry sponsored benefit for the museum’s Costume Institute. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1878

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly parallels the ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ piece — another case of a sensual dance form migrating from a stigmatized class to elite society, complete with the press moralizing (Times calling it ‘a new brand of voodoo’).
• CANDY: The twist at the Met during a Costume Institute benefit is a perfect light cocktail-party fact.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s taste for cross-racial cultural borrowing as a pre-condition of avant-garde scenes.