Songfacts®:

• This catchy little oom-pah number is quite possibly the only song that gives us the urge to flap our arms and cluck like a chicken. Written by Swiss accordionist Werner Thomas, the melody first came to him in the late '50s while he was performing at restaurants and holiday resorts. A short time later, dances like The Twist were becoming popular, so he decided to choreograph some easy movements to go along with the song. He told Top 2000 a gogo the avian inspiration came when he went to visit his ducks and geese, who always knew he was coming because of his distinctive gait. They greeted him with a flurry of quacking and flapping that he turned into a routine he called "Der Ententanz" or "The Duck Dance."
• With birds on the brain, Thomas played a gig at a mountain resort and watched skiers zip past the window while he performed. He noticed the avian-like movement of their limbs and incorporated the motions into the dance, which proved to be quite a workout for the crowd. The next day, several of "Der Ententanz" participants complained of muscle pain.
• Why did "The Chicken Dance" cross the Atlantic? To get to any and all celebrations on the other side. It took awhile, but it started with Belgian producer Louis van Rijmenant, who caught one of Thomas' performances and thought the song could be a hit. He added some lyrics to the instrumental and released it through his publishing company, Intervox Music. In 1973, he teamed with the group Bobby Setter's Cash & Carry to release a synthesizer version titled "Tchip Tchip." It sold over a million copies in Europe, where it spawned dozens of covers in various languages under multiple titles. It got so popular that when it came on the car radio, people allegedly pulled over, jumped out of their vehicles, and danced on the side of the road.
  
  In 1980, the Dutch band De Electronica released an instrumental rendition called "De Vogeltjesdans" or "Dance, Little Bird" that was a Top 10 hit on the Dutch charts. The decade saw more hit renditions. London producer Henry Hadaway's instrumental "The Birdie Song," credited to The Tweets, hit #2 in the UK in 1981. The following year, Canadian polka band The Emeralds included "The Bird Dance" on their popular album of the same name, which went double platinum in Canada.
  
  In the midst of the craze, an American music producer named Stanley Mills was visiting France for a music publishers convention and heard the song. He brought "Dance, Little Bird" home and commissioned English lyrics but they didn't stick. The instrumental, however, slowly developed a following in polka circles. In 1994, Mills got a call from a producer who was making an album of dance favorites and wanted permission to use "The Chicken Dance." Mills didn't know what he was talking about. "I said, 'I don't own anything called 'The Chicken Dance,'" he recalled to Bryan Wooley, author of Mythic Texas. "He said, 'Yes, you do. I'll play it over the phone.' When he did that, I realized it was my song. It got that name by itself. Don't ask me how. This record - called Turn Up The Music - became a huge success. It sold hundreds of thousands of albums."
• The dance may be popular but that doesn't mean it's cool - least of all to metal fans. In 2004, Vince Neil of Motley Crue served as the Grand Marshal at Oktoberfest Zinzinnati in Cincinnati, Ohio, which holds an annual "World's Largest Chicken Dance." Metal fans cried foul - or fowl, if you will - when footage surfaced of Neil doing the cutesy jig at the event. VH1 also voted it the least metal moment in heavy metal history in its compilation of 40 Least Metal Moments.
• Weird Al Yankovic included this in his polka medley "Polkarama!" from his 2006 album, Straight Outta Lynwood.
• This was used in the movies Crime Wave (1985) and Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius (2001).