Beguine (dance) Beguine (dance) The beguine is a dance and music form, similar to a slow rhumba. It was popular in the 1930s, coming from the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, where in local Creole "Beke" or "Begue" means a White person, and "Beguine" is the female form. It is a combination of Latin folk dance and French ballroom dance, and is a spirited but slow, close dance with a roll of the hips (a movement inherited from rumba) After Cole Porter wrote the song "Begin the Beguine", the dance became more widely known beyond the Caribbean. The song was introduced in
Begin the Beguine Begin the Beguine "Begin the Beguine" is a popular song written by Cole Porter. Porter composed the song between Kalabahi, Indonesia, and Fiji during a 1935 Pacific cruise aboard Cunard's ocean liner "Franconia". In October 1935, it was introduced by June Knight in the Broadway musical "Jubilee", produced at the Imperial Theatre in New York City. Musicologist and composer Alec Wilder described it in his book "American Popular Song: The Great Innovators 1900–1950" as "a maverick, an unprecedented experiment and one which, to this day, after hearing it hundreds of times, I cannot sing or whistle or play from start