Hank Ballard is remembered for recording a trilogy of risqué R&B numbers: “Work With Me, Annie,” “Annie Had a Baby” and “Annie’s Aunt Fannie.” Yet Ballard’s contribution to rock and roll goes much deeper than that. With the grinding guitars, distorted sound and fervid call-and-response of those and many other recordings made for the King and Federal labels, Ballard helped define the sound of rock and roll. He also ushered forth one of its greatest dance crazes, having written and first recorded “The Twist.” By the early 1960s, he’d charted 22 singles on the R&B charts, including “Work With Me, Annie,” which was the biggest R&B hit of 1954. It sold more than a million copies and spawned more than 20 answer records (including Etta James’ The Wallflower).

The Detroit-born Ballard was working on a Ford Motor Company assembly line when he joined the Royals, a local singing group. In a short time, they moved from the smooth delivery of sentimental material to a more lascivious and bluesy approach, as evidenced by their earliest hits, “Get It” and “Work With Me, Annie.” The Royals followed “Annie” with “Sexy Ways,” by which time they’d changed their name to the Midnighters in order to avoid confusion with the “5” Royales. Ballard wrote and recorded “The Twist” with the Midnighters in 1958, but their record label relegated it to a B side, leaving it to Chubby Checker to take “The Twist” to Number One not once but two times, in 1960 and 1962. Hank Ballard and Midnighters continued to record deep blues and infectious, undiluted R&B such as “Finger Poppin’ Time” and “Let’s Go, Let’s Go, Let’s Go” into the early Sixties. Although the Midnighters’ recording career lost steam in the wake of Motown, the British Invasion and other developments on the contemporary front, they subsequently made a decent living playing nightclubs and frat parties, finally disbanding in 1967.