How did Chubby Checker get his name?
Unless you’ve lived under a rock for the past seven years, you’ve at some point encountered one of the countless TikTok dances. Whether on your phone screen or coming across them being recorded in the wild by groups of surprisingly coordinated teens, they might seem a particularly modern phenomenon. However, songs teaching listeners a dance go back to the very dawn of popular music as we know it, and the man responsible for being the most influential among them was born Ernest Evans on October 3rd, 1941, but you may know him better as Chubby Checker.
Checker may not have been quite as influential or groundbreaking as Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley or Little Richard, but he was one of early rock ‘n’ roll’s great entertainers. It’s telling that he made a name for himself by doing uncanny imitations of the rock superstars of the day.
He used his magnetic charisma and charm as effectively as any rocker of his time using a guitar or a piano. His 1960 mega-hit ‘The Twist’ has served as the blueprint for every dance song recorded since, from ‘The Loco-Motion’ and ‘The Time Warp’ to ‘Cha Cha Slide’ and ‘Toosie Slide’.
So, how did one of the biggest hit-makers of the early 1960s get that stage name? For one, it wasn’t entirely a record-label invention. When Evans was a kid, he balanced his school work with a variety of jobs at the Ninth Street Italian Market in his home town of South Philadelphia. He was already a talented singer, joining a vocal group at the tender age of 11, so his bosses reasoned that rather than having him work chopping meat behind the counter, he’d be better off entertaining the customers and getting the stall as much attention as possible.
This sat well with Evans. He’d already be spending the day entertaining his classmates with impressions of singers like Elvis Presley and Fats Domino, and now he was getting paid for it! The only downside was the nickname his boss gave him, “chubby”. Charming. However, the newly christened Chubby was a natural, so much so that when Henry Colt, the owner of the stall he worked at, saw Chubby work his magic, he contacted Kal Mann, a friend of his who worked as a songwriter for Cameo-Parkway Records.
Together, the two arranged for Chubby to record a demo for Dick Clark, the host of American Bandstand and one of the musical tastemakers for the whole country. The song written for Chubby was a novelty song called ‘The Class’, which essentially served as an excuse to show off his extensive back catalogue of impressions. When recording the song, Clark’s wife Barbara was particularly impressed by his Fats Domino impression. She suggested that as a tribute to the New Orleans legend, Chubby should add “Checker” to his stage name, just like Fats had “Domino”.
With that, the stage name was complete, and while ‘The Class’ was a modest hit in 1959, his follow-up single ‘The Twist’ a year later, hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and made him a national sensation. He spent the first half of the 1960s as a bona fide hit-maker, scoring another number-one hit with ‘The Pony’, and having a fistful of other hits like ‘Let’s Twist Again’, ‘Birdland’ and ‘Loddy Lo’. Not bad for a market boy from Philly.
