Chubby Checker makes no bones about the fact that he changed the world - or at least the part of it that dictates how people dance.

"The Twist is like animation, the telephone and the wheel," Checker said in a call from his New York office. "It gave us dancing as we know it today. The Twist isn't an old artifact hanging on a shelf. It's the invention of dancing apart. Before Chubby Checker, no one did. The Twist came along and the whole world changed."Who can argue with him? After all, when "The Twist" first topped the charts in 1961, the Kennedys were in the White House and much of America was still dancing close together.

After Checker, the dance floor would never be the same. The Twist quickly gave rise to other dance crazes: the Pony, the Limbo, the Jerk. But unlike many of those passing fads, The Twist never quite died out.

Sure, it found itself on the back burner for years at a time, as did Checker himself. But with each successive decade, the dance and the song made a comeback. And now the man who gave the world the art of dancing apart is riding high on the wave of nostalgia.

"The Twist" topped the charts in 1962 and cracked the Top 20 again in 1988 in a version featuring Checker and The Fat Boys.

Checker is actually the stage name for Ernest Evans, whose family moved to Philadelphia from South Carolina in the mid-'50s. It was in Philly that Checker began singing on street corners with friends, and there that Dick Clark's first wife "discovered" him and persuaded him to change his name.

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Today, Checker plays almost 300 dates a year.

He considered quitting music in the early 1980s when his attempts to record new songs flopped.

At age 46, Checker said he can't even conceive of retirement.

"I can't think about retiring," he said with a laugh. "All the real rockers are over 45 anyway. As long as the music sounds good and sells, (age) doesn't matter."

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