Where did the Chicken Dance come from?
UC musicologist breaks down the Oktoberfest tradition
The Chicken Dance has been a staple event of Oktoberfest Zinzinnati for decades. The German-themed festival set the record for the world's largest Chicken Dance in 1994.
WVXU's Bill Rinehart took a deep dive into how the unique tradition took flight in his Cincinnati mysteries segment, OKI Wanna Know. He turned to a University of Cincinnati musicologist for a closer look at the song and dance's history.
UC College-Conservatory of Music professor of musicology Jonathan Kregor explained that the music was composed in eastern Switzerland by Werner Thomas after the Second World War. Kregor noted that 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," he told WVXU. "That seems to have something to do with the moves that people do when the music sort of carries them away."
"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 we associate with the polka," Kregor said. But he specified that "the polka is a different dance."
While the song used for the Chicken Dance is European in origin, the most recognizable lyrics come from the United States.
"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," Kregor said. "It was only in the early '80s when a man named Bob Kames who comes out of Milwaukee, he recorded the piece which he had heard in a German bar, and he put some words to it."
"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?' It tells you exactly what to do. This is another reason for the piece's success."
Featured image at top of participants in the Oktoberfest Zinzinnati Chicken Dance. Photo/WVXU/Jennifer Merritt
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