My song today is ‘Hippy Hippy Shake’. This song was written and recorded by Chan Romero in 1959. That same year, it reached Number 3 in Australia. Romero was 17 years old when he wrote the song.
A live version of ‘Hippy Hippy Shake’ was recorded in July 1963 by the Beatles. ‘The Swinging Blue Jeans’ also recorded the song, along with an Italian rocker called ‘Little Tony’ who found moderate success in the United Kingdom and Italy. May others also covered the song.
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Before I went to live in Canada for a few years in 1963, the dancing style of my late teens involved rock and rolling (or bopping as we called it). There was a brief interlude during this period when the Twist had its moments on the dance floor. By the time I had returned to the UK, although ‘bopping’ was still popular, a new form of dance now occupied the dance halls. This new way of dancing was known as the ‘Shake’.
The ‘Shake’ was a fad dance of the mid-1960s and was characteristic of ‘tense jerkiness’ of limbs and head shaking, The ‘Shake’ had no particular danced moves or steps, and essentially heralded the age of ‘individualism’ on the dance floor. It had superseded the ‘Twist’ in popularity by 1965, and while ‘Rock and Roll’ never died out, neither did the ‘Shake’. I always saw the ‘Shake’ as being an individualistic dance, with no steps, and lots of legs trembling, arms arbitrarily gesticulating, and severe head shaking. Senior citizens watching on as their grandchildren danced away, could be forgiven for thinking that the young floor dancers had either entered a demented state or were on the verge of throwing an epileptic fit!
The one good thing about the shake, however, was that males or females could either dance in pairs, in circles of three or four, or in larger groups. Dancers without a partner often danced alone, and whatever formation one took, nobody looked out of place doing the ‘Shake’. Indeed, to do the ‘Shake’ was tantamount to ‘doing one’s own thing’ on the dance floor. Having no formal steps whatsoever, anyone could ‘Shake’, and people of all ages did so at dances, wedding parties, social events, and family gatherings. There is not one young person country-wide who has not died through sheer embarrassment whenever they have watched their ‘old’ parents, dodgy aunts and 60-year-old uncles who pretend to be 20-year-old lotharios take the floor at evening wedding receptions and other family functions when they have either had too much to drink, or are past caring, or don’t stop to think that anyone may be watching them?
Love and peace Bill xxx