These songs have lyrics that teach you a dance

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Originally published at: These songs have lyrics that teach you a dance | Boing Boing

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The Humpty Dance is your chance to do the Hump.

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Family Matters Dancing GIF

I remember doing the Hokey Pokey at the roller rink when I was a kid…

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Ahem

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Ain’t nothing wrong with Kylie’s version, tho.

Also… Cha Cha Slide…

It got played every year at my daughter’s school fun run…

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Some dance instructions are very hard to follow.

♪♫ The very first thing that you have to do ♫♪
♫♪ Is lift up one of your legs and put it behind you ♪♫
♪♫ Put your arms out to your sides and bend halfway down ♫♪
♫♪ And then you can wave your arms around ♪♫

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Meters teaching you how to do the dirt

and of course:

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came here for this.

Also:

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It might be that you still need to be Tom Waits to follow the instructions …

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Just realised that “Teach Me How to Dougie” does not, in fact, teach one how to Dougie.

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Also, we don’t know what the monster mash actually sounds like…

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An extremely popular novelty song in Italy in the '80 was Gioca Jouer, that received also an English version as “Superman”
It is considered now as a kids dance song, but at the launch it was a disco sensation :laughing:

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The first dance I ever learned.

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I assumed the “they all went to heaven in a little row boat” line in Tom Waits’s “Clap Hands” was original, but apparently its from Shirley Ellis’s “Clapping Song”

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pretty sure I know what it sounds like… :upside_down_face:

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Also, did not realise it was a cover.

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and, he doesn’t tell you how to do the dances, but this crowd does not seem to need instruction:

and here’s the Watusi, the Freddie, AND some version of my own first-learned dance, The Jerk:

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The pedant in me points out that many of the songs proposed by our Boingers exhort you to do a dance rather than instruct you how do it. “The Monster Mash,” for example. Admittedly some of the instructions in the lyrics are pretty obscure. Would you really learn how to “Walk Like an Egyptian” without also seeing someone perform the dance? Similarly the lyrics of “The Twist” never go beyond “round and round.”

Anyway, I offer two favorites from my obscure corner of the universe. First, “College Rhythm” by the marvellous Lyda Roberti:

And “Ballin’ the Jack,” a big hit with a long life. The clip is from 1942 but the songs dates from 1913.

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