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Fact #95502

When:

Short story:

Chris Montez enters the Billboard Singles Chart in the USA for the first time with Let's Dance.

Full article:

Chris Montez : My real first name is Ezquiel, so my nickname was Zeke, but the publishers wanted to call me Chris Montez. I went home and told my family and they liked it. It made me laugh, to have a new identity.

Let's Dance was written by my producer, who was also my manager. There were studio guys on the records, and the drummer was a happy feller who really had a groove. I sang along while they cut the track for Let's Dance and then I cut the vocal in two or three takes. It was a very good record, but I had no idea what was going to come out of it. It was phenomenal, and everybody associates me with Let's Dance. The twist era obviously helped the record as it mentions both the twist and The Watusi.

We made sure we had that same organ sound whenever we recorded. It had a sound of its own.

I toured with the Sam Cooke show with Smokey Robinson and Jerry Butler and it was night after night of getting on the bus at three in the morning. We played black theatres like the Apollo. Sam Cooke was wonderful. He made sure that everything was right for me, as it was his tour. We were going to different parts of the South and they had to go to the back of the restaurants and the like. Sometimes I had to get the food for them. When I went into the white washrooms, people would look at me strange because I was brown - and in a couple of places, the blacks objected when I used theirs because they thought of me as white.

I was only doing two or three songs but I was watching everybody else. Sam Cooke had Bring It On Home To Me out and it touched my heart. We would do three to five shows a day, usually at movie theatres. We might start at noon and I was the third one on. There might only be four or five people sitting there, but we had to do the show with all ten acts. The next show would be at two, then at four, and so on.