HANK BALLARD: Hank Ballard (75), the singer and songwriter whose hit The Twist ushered in a nationwide dance craze in the 1960s, has died at home in Los Angeles of throat cancer.
He wrote and recorded The Twist in 1958, but it was released only as a B-side. In 1959, Chubby Checker debuted his own version on Dick Clark's Philadelphia television show.
It soon topped the charts and launched a dance craze that prompted the creation of other Twist songs, including Twist and Shout by the Isley Brothers and Twistin' the Night Away by Sam Cooke.
Ballard was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990.
In 1996 he described music as his medicine.
"If you're looking for youth, you're looking for longevity, just take a dose of rock-and-roll," he said. "It keeps you going. Just like the caffeine in your coffee. Rock-and-roll is good for the soul, for the well-being, for the psyche, for your everything. I love it."
Ballard was discovered in the early 1950s by writer-producer Johnny Otis. He was lead singer for the Royals, which changed its name to the Midnighters. His songs were sometimes banned from 1950s radio for their sexually suggestive lyrics.
By the early 1960s, he had charted 22 singles on the rhythm and blues charts, including Work with Me Annie, the biggest R&B hit of 1954, selling more than one million, despite such lines as "Annie please don't cheat; give me all my meat."
The song inspired a series of other risqué R&B numbers that included Annie Had a Baby ("Now I know and it's understood. That's what happens when the going gets good."), Annie's Aunt Fannie and Roll With Me Henry. (The hit cover version for white audiences was Dance With Me Henry.)
Ballard and the Midnighters didn't suffer from Checker's version of The Twist. In 1960, the group had three simultaneous hits in the pop top 40: Finger Poppin' Time, Let's Go, Let's Go, Let's Go, and their original version of The Twist.
Ballard said his first inspiration to be a singer was Gene Autry.
"He had a beautiful voice," he said. "I used to try to emulate him, you know. I had my little toy guns. He was not my favourite fighter, though. He was my favourite singer. He was too handsome to be a fighter."
In the late 1960s he embarked on a solo career as a member of soul singer James Brown's Revue. Brown had cited the Midnighters as an early influence on his vocal group, the Famous Flames.
He was born John H. Kendricks in Detroit, and grew up singing in church in Bessemer, Alabama. At 15, he returned to Detroit and set out to form a doo-wop group while working on a Ford Motor Co assembly line.