Song Of The Day 2/25/2015: Johnny & Charley - "La Yenka"

Do the Dance Craze: Ah, “La Yenka.” The enigmatic Spanish dance of… well, it’s just enigmatic, okay? Johnny & Charley came straight outta Barcelona at some indeterminate point in the ’60s for the purpose of seducing simpatico foot artists to do La Yenka, which my auto-correct keeps wanting to change to “La Yenta.”

This being a dance from a remote origin, of course, I could only find information about La Yenka on a Spanish-language site that became readable only through Google Translate. So as not to risk bastardizing the meaning and creating yet another international incident, I just thought I’d copy the Google translation, note-for-note, right here:

“The Yenka” is not a song quality, also contains no message, but much pace and above all memories. It’s a song with a story worth telling . Especially when he was an anthem for youth 60 so eager to rebuild the music then listen. Published in 1964 and “Summer Song” in 1965, “La Yenka” is a catchy song that quickly became famous for its repetitive and contagious dance of small jumps and lateral frontal easy to follow with just hear his letter.

I managed to find a dance-step chart to show you what to do, which I hope I’ve managed to reprint below, in case you wanna get your small jumps and lateral frontal on. To my utter surprise, however, Johnny & Charley were not native Spaniards, swooping into the madcap flash of the ’60s from up north – and, in fact, the origins of La Yenka perhaps lay in a region much closer to their own homeland:

The brothers Johnny and Charley Kurt a Dutch duo arrived, success as fleeting as lightning, were the ones who knew how to find the key. A pity that the death of Charley abrupt end his fledgling career… While working in various trades, the nights spent (Charley’s) passion for music, performing in clubs and radio programs. But in 1963 make different choices… Charley prefers to devote to promote new dances. Calls his brother Johnny, who moves to Barcelona, ​​and together are presented with the name of Johnny and Charley. That’s when he proposed the signing Hispavox launch a new dance: “the Yenka,” a dance “jumping” out over the imagination of Charley than anything else, which they say is a kind of Finnish folk dance.

Finally, in 1964, Yenka spread all over Spain:

But it was the “Yenka” dance that triumphed in the making. His musical quality actually stopped not be a pretext to provoke fun with gymnastic movements nigh: small jumps on one foot to finish jumping with both feet together. Was a resounding success, and the album became a bestseller of the year, with compulsory piece at any party or cocktail party. Fever “Yenka” broke out throughout the country. It was so catchy and easy to dance, they did not once but many times, immediately seized the youth. They danced to exhaustion.

In case you’d like to be seized, here are the Yenka steps. This forbidden dance needs no Google translation – or as they say, “Dances are forbidden but not translated by the Google because not needed.”