Some songs are born hits. “Twist and Shout” had to be rescued — twice. Written in 1961 by Phil Medley and Bert Berns, it was first recorded by an R&B vocal group called the Top Notes in a session its own co-writer thought had ruined it. A year later Berns produced the song himself, handing it to three brothers from Cincinnati who turned it into a gospel-fired rave-up and their first Top 20 hit. A year after that, four young men from Liverpool copied the brothers’ arrangement almost move for move and made it immortal. The version the world dances to at weddings is the Beatles’. But the blueprint — the tempo, the fire, and above all that famous ascending bridge — belongs to the Isley Brothers.
First, a Failure at Atlantic
The Top Notes were an American R&B vocal group built around lead singer Howard “Howie” Guyton, and on paper their session had everything going for it. They recorded “Twist and Shout” at Atlantic Studios in New York on 23 February 1961, with an arrangement by Teddy Randazzo and a band that included saxophonist King Curtis, guitarist John Pizzarelli, drummer Panama Francis and the Cookies on backing vocals. The producer was a young Phil Spector, not yet the architect of the Wall of Sound. The record, released on Atlantic that August, had a Latin tinge and, in AllMusic critic Richie Unterberger’s later assessment, a drab, generic R&B melody. It failed to chart at all.
The harshest verdict came from inside the room. Berns, who had written the song with Medley and would later use the professional name Bert Russell, was dissatisfied with the recording and with Spector’s production of it. Where Spector had treated the song as product, Berns heard something rowdier in it — a record that should sound like a room full of people losing their composure. Rather than let the song die with the Top Notes’ single, he decided to prove his point in the studio himself.
The Brothers from Cincinnati
The Isley Brothers were not an obvious rescue party. O’Kelly, Rudolph and Ronald Isley had begun as a gospel-singing family act in Cincinnati in the 1950s — the group dated its start to 1954 — and their one big moment so far, “Shout,” in 1959, had given them a signature song and a reputation as a ferocious live act without quite making them stars. “Shout,” the first song the brothers wrote together, was their first single to chart on the Billboard Hot 100 and went on to sell over a million copies, yet in the years since they had moved between labels and struggled to land a follow-up. What they did have was exactly what Berns’ song needed: a church-raised instinct for call and response, honed in Cincinnati gospel and sharpened on the road, and in Ronald Isley a lead singer who could testify over a band. Where the Top Notes had sung the song, the Isleys were built to preach it.
When the Isleys agreed to record “Twist and Shout” in New York in 1962 for their album Twist & Shout on the Wand label, Berns took the producer’s chair, credited as Bert Russell. The transformation was structural as much as emotional. Unterberger, comparing the two versions, credited the new arrangement with infusing the tune with “gospel-fired soul passion,” and its masterstroke was a bridge that had not existed in this form before: four ascending notes, sung over and over as the tempo seems to lean forward, dissolving into exultant whooping before the band crashes back into the verse. It is the part of the record everyone knows — the slow build of “ahh, ahh, ahh, ahh” that turns a dance song into a countdown. Berns built it, and the Isleys detonated it.
Ronald sang lead; Rudolph and O’Kelly answered him. The single, backed with “Spanish Twist,” was released in May 1962 — some discographies give 16 June — and ran just two minutes and twenty-seven seconds, but there is not a wasted second in it.
The First Top 20 Hit
The record did what the Top Notes’ version could not. “Twist and Shout” climbed to number 17 on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming the Isley Brothers’ first single to reach the chart’s Top 20. On Billboard‘s Hot Rhythm & Blues Singles chart it went to number two, and on the rival Cash Box Top 100 it peaked at number seven — a reminder that in 1962 the trade papers did not always agree, and that by the measure of the shops that sold R&B, the record was bigger than its official pop placing suggests. In Britain it reached a modest number 42, though British musicians were listening far more closely than British buyers.
The single stayed on the Hot 100 for sixteen weeks across the summer of 1962 — not a flash, but a slow build, the profile of a record carried by live reputation and word of mouth. Just as important was what the hit did for the group’s position. The Isleys now had a second signature song to stand beside “Shout,” proof that their stage fire could be bottled, and a calling card that would follow them to every label they joined for the rest of the decade. Berns, meanwhile, had his vindication: the writer, producing his own song under a pseudonym, had shown precisely how it should have been done the first time. He would go on to write or co-write “Piece of My Heart,” “Hang on Sloopy” and “Here Comes the Night,” and to found Bang Records — but “Twist and Shout” remained the clearest demonstration of his central belief, that he understood his own songs better than the men hired to record them.
Then the Beatles Copied the Homework
The Beatles’ rendition, released on their first UK album, Please Please Me, in March 1963, was openly inspired by the Isley Brothers’ version — the arrangement, the bridge, the whoops all carried over. What John Lennon added was desperation. The song was recorded on 11 February 1963 at EMI Studios in London, at the end of the marathon single-day session for the album, when Lennon’s voice, already ravaged by a cold, had almost nothing left. Producer George Martin had deliberately saved it for last. A second take was attempted and abandoned because there was simply no voice left to sing it with; the coughing audible at the end of the record is real. Lennon later admitted he had initially felt ashamed of the performance — “You can hear that I’m just a frantic guy doing his best” — before making peace with the take that Mark Lewisohn would call arguably the most stunning rock and roll vocal performance of all time.
Released as a US single in March 1964, the Beatles’ version reached number two on the Hot 100 in the famous week when the top five places on the chart were all Beatles singles, blocked from the summit only by their own “Can’t Buy Me Love.” It was the only million-selling Beatles single in America that was a cover song, and the only Beatles cover single to reach the top ten of a national chart. The group trusted the song completely: it was their closing number at the Royal Variety Performance in November 1963, they performed it on their Ed Sullivan Show appearance the following February, they recorded it nine times for BBC radio and television, and they kept it in the live set until the end of their 1965 American tour. In 1986, Matthew Broderick’s lip-sync parade through Chicago in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off sent it back up the Hot 100 to number 23. None of this diminished the Isleys’ claim; if anything, it certified it. The most copied record of the British Invasion was a copy itself — of three brothers from Cincinnati, produced by the song’s own writer.
The Verdict of Time
Later versions kept coming. Brian Poole and the Tremeloes took it to number four in Britain in 1963 — a stinging irony, since Decca had signed the Tremeloes in preference to the Beatles after both groups auditioned on the same day, only for the Tremeloes’ breakthrough to arrive by covering the record the Beatles had covered. A quarter-century later, Salt-N-Pepa rebuilt it as hip-hop for their 1988 album A Salt with a Deadly Pepa and pushed it back to number four in Britain and number five in the Netherlands. But the recording’s deepest honour was reserved for the originators of the hit. In 2010, the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout” was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, the Recording Academy’s registry of recordings of lasting qualitative or historical significance, joining their own “Shout,” inducted in 1999.
That is the real shape of the story. A staff writer watched a producer mishandle his song, took it to a struggling gospel trio, and together they built the version a generation of bands would learn from. The Beatles made “Twist and Shout” the most famous two and a half minutes of the rock era. The Isley Brothers made it possible.