Our feature OKI Wanna Know looks for answers for those everyday mysteries. This week, we tackle a Cincinnati tradition, with WVXU's Bill Rinehart.
Usually, we answer listener questions, but I'll be honest; I'm curious too. And this seems like a good time for me to ask a question:
Where did the Chicken Dance come from?
If you're unfamiliar with the Chicken Dance and the Chicken Dance in the Cincinnati area, you should probably go to Oktoberfest Zinzinnati, where it is not only a tradition, but a centerpiece.
The German-themed festival claims the title of the World's Largest Chicken Dance. The president and CEO of the Cincinnati Regional Chamber says when Oktoberfest Zinzinnati started in 1976, the song already was well known.
"It would just get played by various bands and people would sing and dance and enjoy it," says Brendon Cull. "And then in 1992, the great communications and marketing team at the Chamber had the idea we should try to do the world's largest Chicken Dance."
Cull says those first two years were a little chaotic, but they got the bugs out.
"In '94, they had a crown prince, Leopold, from Germany come here, and he was the master of ceremonies for the Chicken Dance," he says. "He brought this beer that they don't even serve in Germany. It was a big to-do, and in 1994 they officially broke the record."
Cull says Zinzinnati isn't fighting to maintain that record. He says being the first to set it was enough. The dance is still a big deal though.
"Over the years we've had different celebrities come and lead the community in the Chicken Dance," Cull says. "Weird Al Yankovic was here in 1999. Davy Jones did it the next year. Vern Troyer did it a couple of years later. I have George Takei. Did George Wendt do it? Norm [from Cheers]?"
"With Homer Simpson," adds the Chamber's Amy Fitzgibbons.
"That's pretty cool!" Cull says.
In 2025, the Chicken Dance will be led by Reds pitcher Brent Suter, and Skyline CEO Dick Williams.
What came first: the chicken or the dance?
Is the Chicken Dance actually called that? Or does it have another name?
A professor of musicology at the University of Cincinnati says the music was composed in eastern Switzerland after the Second World War by a man named Werner Thomas. Jonathan Kregor says there are different names for the dance all over the world.
"They all have something to do with fowl. They could be ducks. They could be chickens. They could be other kinds of winged animals, and that seems to have something to do with the moves that people do when the music sort of carries them away."
Kregor says the Chicken Dance is technically not a polka.
"It does have polka-like qualities and that's probably because most of the versions that you hear, they tend to have a lot of accordion and other instruments that I think we associate with the polka. The polka is a different dance."
Several sources online say the music took a big step toward universal recognition from a 1973 Belgian production that turned it into a disco. A Dutch band covered it in 1980 and made a video, spreading the dance moves.
Jane Maas of Omaha, Nebraska, says she knows how the dance jumped the Atlantic Ocean. She and her husband ran a mobile DJ service with franchises across the country, and were playing the songs at weddings and parties.
"My brother and sister-in-law were on a cruise and they did the Chicken Dance. They came home and they showed us the Chicken Dance and said 'You've got to do this. It was just a riot, and everybody loved it,' " she says. "I believe we did make it popular in the United States."
She says it was still called the Duck Dance at that point.
"They changed the name of the Duck Dance to Chicken Dance because they had this event and they were playing this song, and they couldn't find a duck costume, but they had chicken costumes," she says. "They called it the Chicken Dance and somehow that caught on."
That was in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1981.
Jonathan Kregor says it's possible the song entered the U.S. by several different paths and grew in popularity in many communities. He says it's an easy song to like.
"The words themselves help reinforce the kind of chicken-ness of the song. Questions like, do you want to feel good? Do you want to laugh and play?" he says. "It tells you exactly what to do. This is another, I think, reasons for the piece's success."
Wait — words? There are words? Kregor says it was originally an instrumental.
"When it was still a piece of music that was sort of concentrated in Europe in the '50s and '60s, some words were attached to it but those didn't really take off," he says. "It was only in the early '80s when a man named Bob Kames who comes out of Milwaukee, he records the piece which he had heard in a German bar, and he puts some words to it."
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