The "Shake A Tail Feather" Story

It was an ordinary day. Listening to the car radio and singing along to all my favorite songs I have placed on my phone.  When I am by myself I often try to drown out the radio with my own versions of some of my favorites.  You ever do that?  Many of the songs are from my high school and college years and were associated with specific dance styles or types of dancing such as the Twist and the Hand Jive.  There are a few dance styles that were before my time such as the Charleston which came about during the Roaring 1920s.  That dance style was named after the town where it was created; Charleston, South Carolina.  At the time it was referred to as a scandalous dance, but it rose to national prominence when James P. Johnson composed the song "The Charleston" for the 1923 Broadway show "Run-in' Wild."  The dance was a symbol of the "flapper" culture with the loose arm and leg flapping.  One of the same type of dances from my era was the Hand Jive which came about in the 1950s when I was in Jr. and Sr. High School.  Pretty neat dance with leg slapping, clapping and fist-rolling motions.  At the time it was said that the dance floors were overcrowded due to the rock 'n' roll crowd that a dance was needed where you didn't have to move around as much.  Of course there was The Twist.  One day after school I came home, turned on the TV to watch The Dick Clark Show, which was broadcast from nearby Philadelphia, and there was this guy named Chubby Checker who performed the dance while singing the song of the same name.  Easy to do and even I could do it.  Not sure how bad I looked, but it gave you a good workout.  The dance was actually invented by musician Hank Ballard who wrote the song "The Twist" and released it as a single B-side in 1958.  Took two years and another guy to make it a hit.  Along the way there were other types of dancing which I can remember such as "Swing Dancing" which came about in the jazz era of the 1920s; The Cha-Cha which was a dance that came from Havana which was taken back to Britain and known as the upbeat Cha-Cha-Cha that was performed at 120 beats a minute; Square dancing which came from the 1600s in England, but became famous in the United States, since Henry Ford loved it and poured his resources into developing a national square dancing program; and  Country Line Dancing which began in the 1950s, but became popular in the 1980 John Travolta movie "Urban Cowboy" and in 1992 when Bill Ray Cyrus had a hit song "Achy Breaky Heart."  There were a few other dances which I shyed away from such as "The Hustle" which was from the mid-1970s and designed to adapt to many kinds of popular music;  The Macarena which was around in the early 1990s; "The Flash Mob" which came about in the social media era; and the "Gangnam Style" dance which came about when a Korean pop star named PSY performed a song and dance of the same name that roared across the world and became the first video in history to get 1 billion views.  My dancing days are now over, except for perhaps a slow dance at a wedding or class reunion.  And then, I may have to be helped off the dance floor if it lasts more than a minute or two.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.