Cameo Parkway 1959-1963: The Best Of Chubby Checker CD

Personnel: Chubby Checker (vocals); Dee Dee Sharp, Bobby Rydell (vocals); Joe Sher (guitar, drums); Joe Sgro, Joe Renzetti , Joe Renzetti (guitar); Dan Dailey, Fred Nuzzullio, Georgie Young & the Rockin 'Bocs, Georgie Young (saxophone); Fred Bender (keyboards); Joe Macho (bass instrument); Joe Sher, Ellis Tollin, Ellis Tollin (drums); Dave Appell (guitar); Buddy Savitt (saxophone); Roy Stragis (keyboards); Bobby Gregg (drums).
Recording information: Bell Sound Studios, New York, NY (01/1959-11/1963); Cameo Parkway Studio, Philadelphia, PA (01/1959-11/1963); Cherry Hill, NJ (01/1959-11/1963); Reco-Art Sound Recording, Philadelphia, PA (01/1959-11/1963).
Unknown Contributor Role: Kenneth Salinsky.
Arrangers: Dave Appell; Dave Stephens.
The Chubby Checker installment in the Cameo Parkway series, an excellent string of discs highlighting the label's artists from the late 1950s and '60s, will disappoint neither long-time fans nor those looking for a compilation of Chubby's biggest hits. Naturally, "The Twist" is here, as are all of the singer's follow-up cash-ins ("Let's Twist Again;" "Slow Twistin,'" etc.), and a host of other dance-craze songs ("The Hucklebuck;" "Limbo Rock," "The Fly"). The mood is light, buoyant, and fun throughout, as anyone familiar with any of Checker's singles would assume. Excellent sound and liner notes make this a fine choice for anyone seeking a one-stop set of Checker's best moments.
For a variety of reasons, all of the recordings for Cameo Parkway remained out of circulation until 2005, when Abkco finally unveiled the catalog, first as a box set called Cameo Parkway 1957-1967 in the spring, then as a series of individual artist compilations in the fall. Of those, the most eagerly-awaited collection was the one spotlighting Chubby Checker, since he was the biggest star on the label and the guy that got America twisting in the early '60s. Checker might have had big hits, but his compilation, The Best of Chubby Checker: Cameo Parkway 1959-1963, is musically the thinnest of all the Cameo Parkway titles released in 2005. Checker wasn't much of a vocalist -- he got his break because he was an excellent mimic, capable of imitating such early rock & rollers as Fats Domino quite expertly (born Ernest Evans, the singer even played off Domino's name when he came up with an alias for the stage). His first big break was "The Class," where he did impressions of Fats, Elvis and, bizarrely, the Chipmunks, but his big hit came when he did a song-length impression of Hank Ballard doing "The Twist" in 1960. As Jeff Tamarkin points out in his good liner notes to this compilation, Chubby's version of "The Twist" was "virtually identical to Ballard's," but Checker and Cameo Parkway were based in Philadelphia, the home of Dick Clark's American Bandstand, where the singer and the song got enormous exposure. After it became a huge national hit, Checker and Cameo Parkway went back to the well numerous times -- "Twistin' USA," "Let's Twist Again," a version of "Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On" that contains all of Jerry Lee Lewis' ad-libs, yet Chubby sings "whole lotta twistin' goin' on" -- before the craze died down a bit. Once that happened, there were other dances to do -- "The Hucklebuck," "Pony Time" -- which also produced several sound-alike records from Checker himself before "The Twist" came back, prompting another round of twist songs, like "Slow Twistin'." Then, Checker had another dance craze with "Limbo Rock" (predictably followed by "Let's Limbo Some More"), before he had a brief phase as a folk-pop singer pitched halfway between Harry Belafonte and the Rooftop Singers. When that ran dry, it was back to the Twist ("Twist It Up," "Twistin' Round the World"), before he parted ways with the label and slowly receded to the oldies circuit.
What ties all this music together, even the folk excursion, was that it was lightweight dance music and, when taken together as a full album, it gets to be a little bit