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So, to start off, there’s nothing original about doing “La Bamba” and “Twist and Shout” as a medley. The first version I’m aware of was recorded by Johnny Rivers more than sixty years ago, and a lot of people have done it since. I’d guess a lot of people did it before that, as well, because the Isley Brothers’ built their hit directly on the Richie Valens version of the Mexican song.

“La Bamba” was first recorded by Álvaro Hernández Ortiz “El Jarocho” in 1938, as a catchy son jarocho (a traditional style from Veracruz), but his version is quite different from the one Valens recorded in 1958. I first heard the song performed by a teenage José Feliciano on an LP of the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. He presumably picked it up from the Valens hit, but turned it into an incredible guitar showcase, with flamenco runs and all sorts of other trickeration, and I just learned that Vanguard Records, which had the record rights to all the Newport festival performances, made a unique choice to release it as a single.

As for “Twist and Shout,” I just learned that it was originally recorded by a group called the Top Notes in 1961, co-written by Bert Berns, one of the underappreciated producer/songwriters of the early soul period, with King Curtis on sax. It’s a perfectly good record, and not obviously related to “La Bamba,” but was shortly eclipsed by the Isleys’ hit version, which recycled the “La Bamba” guitar riff as its dominant theme and became the model for all later versions, notably the Beatles’ cover, which was an even bigger hit and is most familiar today.

The Isleys had kind of a prior claim to the title concept, since they had recorded their early masterpiece, “Shout!”  before the twist craze, and Berns was presumably building on the combined appeal of those words. I’ve written about “Shout!” in How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll and again in Rock ‘n’ Roll: A Very Short Introduction, because it was the ultimate example of Black church music being directly adapted as a dance hit, down to the name. (In the church, to “shout” is to be possessed by the spirit to the point of losing mental and physical control.) It was also an interesting example of a record that did not become a significant hit, but was picked up as a ubiquitous live number. When I asked Dale Hawkins, of “Suzie Q” fame, what he was playing in the early 1960s when he added horns and fronted a rock ‘n’ roll dance band, his laconic response was, “Back then if you didn’t play ‘Shout’ you might just as well stay home.”

Which said, I got “Twist and Shout” from the Beatles, and only discovered the Isleys’ version many years later. As I recall, it’s another song I learned by osmosis, and I don’t ever remember playing it until I was sitting in a park in Oaxaca one evening with my guitar and some young guys came up and asked me to play. I remember they requested “Jailhouse Rock,” which was a big hit in Mexico in a Spanish-language version by Los Teen Tops, and in search of another song that would combine Spanish with rock ‘n’ roll I came up with this medley. I honestly think I hadn’t heard the Johnny Rivers record and it was an independent, though obvious, invention… but I could be wrong, because I did acquire his Golden Hits LP around that time, and this is on it.

Be that as it may… I don’t recall ever playing it again until recently, when the Very Short Introduction book got me on a rock ‘n’ roll kick, and in particular a Latin-rhythm-flavored rock ‘n’ roll kick — other examples in the Songobiography include “Save the Last Dance for Me,” “Under the Boardwalk,” “Little Darlin’,” and Buddy Holly’s “Everyday” —  so this fits right in, and I worked out an arrangement I like, and here it is.