Word: tangos
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When it appeared, the Argentine tango scandalized all respectable people, and they were not slow in saying so. In those early years of the 20th Century, the German Kaiser, the King of Italy, the Queen of England and the Pope were all in agreement: they detested the tango...
Thundered the Archbishop of Lyon: "This abominable dance kills virtue, and gives rein to every appetite." At an Atlanta, Ga. Bible conference, Dr. Campbell Morgan declared that the tango was a reversion to the ape. A New York doctor announced a new disease, the tango foot. In Paris, the Argentine ambassador added his censure. "The tango," said he, "is a dance peculiar to the houses of ill fame in Buenos Aires and is never cultivated at respectable gatherings...
...Waterfront. Along the rough and bawdy Buenos Aires waterfront, in lamplit saloons and "dancing academies," the tango had long been danced by prostitutes and lawless toughies. It got into society by accident.To clean out the toughs, vigilante groups of rich young Argentines invaded the waterfront, stayed to learn the tango, later carried it to the ballrooms of France. Transplanted, the tango retained its sad, metallic tempo-one, two, three, pause-and continued to be danced by automatons whose torsos remained in expressionless rapture while their legs swept nimbly through the corte (cross step) and corrida (promenade). Actor Rudolph Valentino showed...
...tango tunes put together by the Tin Pan Alleys along the Plata, the one locally regarded as No. 1 is La Cumparsita. Gerardo Hernán Mattos Rodríguez, a Uruguayan, wrote it in 1916. An architecture student at the University of Uruguay, he had seen a group of boisterous fellow students, evicted from their rooming house, pick up the tables and chairs and march out in a noisy procession (cumparsa). That gave him a title. He quickly knocked out a doleful melody and a set of lyrics that were soon replaced by those of a rival lyricist...
Guatemala hurriedly prepared to recognize both Chile's and Argentina's Antarctic claims, even though they overlapped. Argentine Tango Composer Enrique Dicépolas got a cable from Mexico City: "Word has reached here of the gallant posture you've assumed in front of the intransigent British lion. It pleases me to offer you the Mexican fleet if Argentina needs reinforcements to defeat the English wherever they may be found. Because what are we? Brave cats or miserable mice? At your service. Signed: Juan Charrasqueado [Scarface John-Mexico's man-in-the-street and currently...