In showbiz, they say you’ll find luck at the intersection of talent and opportunity. You can manage to succeed riding down one road or the other, but it sure helps when they cross.

Ernest Evans grew up in Philadelphia singing on street corners like every other city kid in the 1950s. In school, he would entertain his classmates with impressions of the new rock and rollers — Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino — impressions he also performed for his coworkers at the poultry factory he worked at when he got a little older. It was these coworkers who bequeathed young Ernest with the nickname Chubby.

Now, it just so happened that the owner of said poultry factory counted among his good friends a songwriter for the Cameo-Parkway label, and this friend introduced the talented Mr. Evans to the hottest teen music mogul in the country, the coast to coast host of American Bandstand, Philadelphia’s own Dick Clark. As luck would have it, Clark wanted someone to record a novelty song with different voices and Ernest seemed the perfect choice.

In the recording studio, Clark’s wife walked into the room in the middle of a Fats Domino impression. After the song she asked the young singer his name and he responded by saying, “They call me Chubby.” Thinking he was joking, riffing on his Fats impression, she responded with a riff on Domino, “Chubby Checker?” Oh, how they laughed. And the name stuck.

Checker signed with Cameo-Parkway, and when a Baltimore DJ informed Clark that his audience really liked “The Twist” by Hank Ballard (teens twisting in Florida inspired Ballard to write the song), Clark tapped the 18-year-old with the impressive vocal mimicry to record a cover.

Released in the summer of 1960, “The Twist” wound itself up and all the way to the top of the charts as teens everywhere took to the dance. So long-lasting and pervasive was the craze that Checker managed to score five more Twist-related hits over the next three years. But even more incredibly, the song and associated dance slowly filtered upwards into the adult world (it’s such an easy dance and you don’t look silly like when you’re doing other teen dances such as The Monkey or The Pony) and in 1962 “The Twist” became the Grover Cleveland of rock & roll, becoming the only song ever to reach #1 in non-consecutive runs (excluding Christmas songs, which I do — sorry, Mariah).

So c’mon baby, and go like this, round and around …. with Chubby Checker.