Rumba Trivia | 50 facts about the Latin dance

Rumba is a cheerful dance, that started from Southern American, and then, it gained popularity all over the world.

Let’s find out more about this popular Latin dance!

1. Rumba is a music and dance term with two different meanings.
2. The term rumba may refer to a variety of unrelated music styles.
3. Originally, “rumba” was used as a synonym for “party” in northern Cuba.
4. More specifically, it means Cuban event of African style, the rumba genre of Afro-Cuban music.
5. This use of the term ‘rumba’ is quite different from the Latin ballroom dance.
6. By the late 19th century it was used to denote the complex of secular music styles known as Cuban rumba.
7. Since the early 20th century the term has been used in different countries to refer to distinct styles of music and dance, most of which are only tangentially related to the original Cuban rumba, if at all.
8. The vague etymological origin of the term rumba is largely responsible for such worldwide polysemy of the term.
9. In addition, “rumba” was the primary marketing term for Cuban music in North America, as well as West and Central Africa, during much of the 20th century, before the rise of mambo, pachanga and salsa.
10. Also, it refers to one of the Latin ballroom dances.
11. In this sense, the Rumba is the slowest of the five competitive International Latin dances (Paso doble,Samba, Cha-cha-cha, Jive).
12. This ballroom Rumba was also danced in Cuba to a rhythm they call the bolero-son.
13. The international style was derived from studies of dance in Cuba in the pre-revolutionary period.
14. During the second half of the 19th century, several secular dance-oriented music styles were developed by Afro-Cuban workers in the poor neighbourhoods of Havana and Matanzas.
15. These syncretic styles would later be referred to as “rumba”.
16. Traditionally, the three main styles of rumba are yambú, columbia and guaguancó.
17. Each of them has a characteristic dance, rhythm and singing.
18. Although still a purely folkloric genre, numerous innovations have been introduced in rumba since the mid 20th century.
19. In the US, the term “rhumba” began to be used during the 1920s to refer to ballroom music with Afro-Cuban music themes.
20. It was particularly used in the context of big band music.
21. Rhumba is an anglicised version of rumba.
22. By the 1930s, with the release of “The Peanut Vendor”.
23. “The Peanut Vendor” was a genre that had become highly-successful and well-defined.
24. It was described on the label as a rumba, perhaps because the word son would not be understood in English.
25. The label stuck, and a ‘rumba craze’ developed through the 1930s.
26. This kind of rumba was introduced into dance salons in America and Europe in the 1930s, and was characterized by variable tempo, sometimes nearly twice as fast as the modern ballroom Rumba.
27. The rhumba dance that developed on the East Coast of the United States was based on the bolero-son.
28. The first rumba competition took place in the Savoy Ballroom in 1930.
29. Nowadays, two different styles of ballroom rumba coexist: American-style and International-style.
30. The modern style of dancing the Rumba derives from studies made by dance teacher Monsieur Pierre (Pierre Zurcher-Margolle).
31. Pierre, then from London, visited Cuba in 1947, 1951 and 1953.
32. He aimed to find out how and what Cubans were dancing at the time.
33. The international ballroom Rumba is a slower dance of about 120 beats per minute which corresponds.
34. All social dances in Cuba involve a hip-sway over the standing leg and, though this is hardly noticeable in fast salsa, it is more pronounced in the slow ballroom rumba.
35. In Spain, the term rumba was introduced in the early 20th century as rumba flamenca.
36. It was one of the palos (styles) of flamenco.
37. Musicologists agree that rumba flamenca does not truly derive from Cuban rumba, but from guaracha, a fast-paced music style from Havana.
38. Apart from rumba flamenca, other syncretic styles of Afro-Cuban origin have been named “rumba” throughout the Iberian peninsula, outside of the context of flamenco (where the term cantes de ida y vuelta is mostly restricted), such as the Galician rumba.
39. Galician rumba belongs to those songs and dances called cantes de ida y vuelta, “of departure and return”, like the Habanera, that “travelled” back from Cuba to the Spanish motherland to establish themselves as musical genres cultivated and cherished by the Spanish population.
40. In the late 1950s, popular artists such as Peret (El Rey de la Rumba) and El Pescaílla developed an uptempo style that combined elements from rumba flamenca, Spanish gypsy music and pop.
41. This became known as Catalan rumba (rumba catalana).
42. In the 1980s, the style gained international popularity thanks to French ensemble Gipsy Kings.
43. In the 1990s, the term “tecno-rumba” was used to describe the music of Camela, and later Azúcar Moreno.
44. Since the early 2000s, the term rumba has been used in Spain to refer to derivatives of Catalan rumba with hip hop and rock elements.
45. Some popular songs was recorded by Estopa, Huecco and Melendi.
46. Rumba dancing improves your cardiovascular system, increases your muscle tone and help you to burn calories the healthy way
47. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, a fusion of bambuco and Afro-Cuban music was developed in Colombia.
48. It was developed by famous artists such as Emilio Sierra, Milciades Garavito, and Diógenes Chaves Pinzón.
49. It was developed under the name rumba criolla (creole rumba).
50. Rumba criolla is classified into different regional styles such as rumba antioqueña and rumba tolimense.