Twist and Shout
by The Beatles
- 123
- BPM
- A major
- Key
- 11B
- Camelot
- 49
- Danceability
- 65
- Acousticness
Bert Berns, who also used the name Bert Russell, co-wrote "Twist and Shout" with Phil Medley in 1961. The Top Notes recorded it first, at Atlantic Studios on February 23, 1961, with Howie Guyton on lead vocals, King Curtis on saxophone and the Cookies singing backup. Teddy Randazzo arranged the session and Phil Spector produced. Berns was unhappy with the result. It failed to chart.
When the Isley Brothers took it on in 1962 for their album Twist & Shout, Berns produced the session himself. The new arrangement had more gospel-fired soul. It added the bridge, a build of four ascending notes and whooping that carried the group back into the verse. It became the Isley Brothers' first single to reach the Top 20 on the Billboard Hot 100. The recording was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2010.
Others have covered it since, among them the Beatles, Salt-N-Pepa and Chaka Demus & Pliers, and some of those versions had chart success of their own.
Twist and Shout runs at 123 BPM, the tempo of house, disco and most club dance music. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.95 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 488 ms. It is in A major, Camelot 11B, which shares its notes with F# minor and mixes cleanly with D major and E major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.