Chubby Checker is one of 2025's nominees for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame alongside Bad Company, the Black Crowes, Mariah Carey, Joe Cocker, Billy Idol, Joy Division/New Order, Cyndi Lauper, Mana, Oasis, Outkast, Phish, Soundgarden, and the White Stripes. 

1. The Slop

2. The Chicken

3. The Strand

4. The "Mexican Hat" Twist

5. The Pony

6. The Jet

7. The Ray Charles-ton

8. Ballin' The Jack

9. Continental Walk

10. Fishin'

11. Dance-A-Long

12. Hi Ho Silver

13. Let's Dance, Let's Dance, Let's Dance

14. The Shimmy

15. Mary Ann Limbo

16. The Killer

17. Oo-Kook-A-Boo

18. (We're Gone) Surfin'

19. Limbo Side By Side

20. She's A Hippy

21. Let's Surf Again

22. Twistin' Round The World

23. Twist Marie

24. How Low Can You Go?

25. The Girl With The Swingin' Derriere

26. A Lotta Limbo

27. Mother Goose Limbo

28. Run, Chico, Run

29. Doncha Get Tired

30. Sippin' Cider Through A Straw

31. The Doodang

32. Ole Anna

33. Go Tell My Baby

At 83 years old, Ernest "Chubby Checker" Evans is by far the oldest and longest tenured artist nominated this year, and he's nominated for the first time. He's said many times that he deserves to be in the Hall, and even protested outside the induction ceremony in 2004, but most people don't seem that eager to take up his cause, even people that champion Black rock & roll trailblazers like Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. 

In 2018, the Hall of Fame created a singles category that existed primarily to recognize significant songs by people who hadn't been inducted into the Hall in any of the artist categories, and "The Twist" was in that first set of songs. Nina Simone and Joan Baez are just about the only artist inducted into the Hall proper (not an 'influences' or 'excellence' category) in the last decade who peaked commercially before Beatlemania. Chubby Checker isn't a one hit wonder, because he had over twenty Top 40 hits. But he is a bit of a one trick pony, and an opportunist who just happened to make the biggest version of Hank Ballard's "The Twist" and turn it into a career. 

One thing that surprised me is that "Let's Twist Again" is by far Chubby Checker's biggest song on Spotify, with nearly twice as many streams as "The Twist." In America, "Let's Twist Again" was a moderate hit, his 6th biggest Hot 100 hit, but in the UK and all over Europe it was huge, and was in The Help and I guess has had a pretty big pop culture footprint, although I can't say I remember hearing it much if ever (unlike some twist records by other artists, like the Isley Brothers and Beatles versions of "Twist & Shout" and Same Cooke's "Twistin' The Night Away"). It's a little bizarre to me, because it sounds like one of his most desperate attempts to simply prolong the crazy, the twist is literally "let's twist again, like we did last summer." Imagine Tommy Richman coming out with "Let's Million Dollar Baby Again" right now. 

The availability of Checker's catalog is patchy on streaming services. This playlist covers 8 of his first 11 albums, 7 of which are available in full on Spotify. He made a few albums after the mid-'60s, but I decided I didn't need to check out his 1994 country album The Texas Twist. The only song I'm truly sad I couldn't include was the 1961 deep cut "The Lose Your Inhibitions Twist." Previously the Everly Brothers and They Might Be Giants were tied for the most tracks I've fit into my self-imposed 8-minute cap for deep cuts playlists. And Chubby beat their 32-song record by just one song here. 

I'm kind of used to early rock acts not having very substantial albums beyond the hits and looking at it as an interesting challenge to still scrape together a playlist, but it is pretty comical just how unapologetically narrow and repetitive Chubby Checker's catalog is. When he wasn't making variations on "The Twist," he was covering other dance craze records, pitching new dance crazes, or jumping on other trends like the limbo, surf rock, and, uh, folk music. I particularly enjoyed opening the playlist with a song called "The Slop" because a lot of this stuff is shameless filler that you might, in modern parlance, refer to as slop. "The Killer" is a murderous parody of "Tequila" and "The Ray Charles-ton" mimics the arrangement of "What'd I Say." I often think of the Deep Album Cuts series as a vehicle for trying to find the hidden depths in the catalog of hitmakers that most people have a reductive view of, but I have to admit, there is absolutely no depth to be found here. That said, I don't wanna sound mean, because it's all pretty jaunty, listenable stuff, and I particularly like his vocal performances on "The Chicken" and "The Girl With The Swingin' Derriere." And "Sippin' Cider Through A Straw" has a really interesting melody and rhythm. 

Chubby Checker recorded for Cameo-Parkway Records, which was co-founded by Kal Mann, and which hired Dave Appell as a producer and A&R director. Appell produced "The Twist," and Mann produced the bulk of Chubby Checker's albums. And the majority of the songs on this playlist were written by Mann and/or Appell (with Mann sometimes credited by the pseudonym Jon Sheldon). "The 'Mexican Hat' Twist" was a riff on "The Mexican Hat Rock," a 1958 hit Appell wrote for The Applejacks, so he was really cannibalizing his previous work twice on that one. I did find that Chubby Checker has songwriting credits on two songs on Chubby's Folk Album: the single "Hooka Tooka" (his last top 20 hit until a 1988 "The Twist" remake with the Fat Boys), and the deep cut "Doncha Get Tired." The latter is pretty much just a thinly veiled rewrite of "Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)," though. 

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