To stick to the topic of the thread and answer the OP's question, I would say Chubby Checker didn't have much effect on my life.

He had a string of dance craze hits and will be best remembered for the Twist (biggest UK hit was Let's Twist Again), which caught on widely and spawned a number of related hits by other artists (including, indirectly, the Beatles who covered the Isleys' "Twist and Shout"). None of the Twist's dance craze successors (some of which were launched by Chubby - The Hucklebuck, Pony, etc.) was able to repeat its success. Apart from that brief spell of chart and dance hall success in the early 1960s, I'm not aware of anything else much about Chubby. Happy birthday to him anyway, but I can't see a lot of relevance of his output to folk music, unless I'm missing something.