One of the most ubiquitous of Latin dance styles, the Cha-Cha developed either from the Cuban danzón of the 1870s or from a slower version of the mambo in New York. By the early '50s, important Cuban large dance orchestras were playing the cha-cha, and as part of a Latin craze, the dance spread like wildfire through American musical culture until almost every populist band needed to add a cha-cha on their LPs.

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