Tango is a dance and music that originated in Buenos Aires (Argentina) at the turn of the 20th century. At this time, Buenos Aires was a melting pot of cultures where immigrants from Europe were mixed with earlier generation of settlers of all races from other South American countries. These immigrants brought their native music and dances with them, and continued to assimilate new innovations from abroad. In the 1880s; the word tango was used at the time to describe various music and dances. Buenos Aires was very poor city, with almost penniless immigrants coming to make their fortunes on the plains of Argentina or Uruguay, failing and ending up in the cities. In the early years of the 1900; 2 million immigrants arrived in BsAs from Europe. Many were single men, hoping to earn enough to return to Europe, or bring their family or buy a bride from Europe. A poor, desperate, male population bred crime, brothels, gangsters, and the tango! Men danced together - there were few women, but tango inevitably moved to where they could be found - in the brothels, and it is said that the women could chose their clients by their dancing skill. The Porteño (man) had three dances to prove himself! In the mysterious way that popular culture develops, this dance and music moved up the social scale, met more refined cousins coming down, and was picked up by the sons of the rich. By 1910 the rich sons of Argentina were making their way to Paris, centre of the cultural and entertainment world. They introduced the tango into a society eager for innovation, and not entirely averse to the risqué nature of this import. In 1913 the Tango had spread from St Petersburg to New York and had become an international phenomenon.

After the First World War Tango became the dominant music and dance of the land in the culturally anarchic 20s. Tango emerged from the small venues, where sex and machismo were the everyday, to become a mass entertainment, danced by thousands of respectable citizens of prospering cities: Argentina was now one of the richest countries in the world. The dance was refined to the slick and elegant 'salon' style, the lyrics of the songs slowly moved from lamenting the poverty and loneliness of the immigrant men, to more generic love songs for the mass market.

IIn the early 30s, the Golden Age of Tango in Argentina began. With a flourishing music, poetry and culture, the tango came to be a fundamental expression of Argentine culture. The depression changed the character of tango, and the lyrics reflected the renewed poverty and social divisions in the country. However the Golden Age lasted through the 40s and 50s, and this is the period of its greatest development and expression. Tango changed with political and economic conditions, and we can hear this in the music. In poorer times, orchestras were smaller, and as political repression developed, lyrics become political too, until they started to be banned as subversive. Tango eventually went out of fashion, crushed like many other dances, by the arrival of America swing and rock and roll, and was repressed by the nationalist government. From the 1960s to the 1980s it was only danced and played by a few of the older generation and enthusiasts. In the early 1980s, with the arrival of democracy in Argentina, and a search for a national culture, tango interest was revived; tango dancers and musicians rediscovered and reinvented the music. The 1990s is period of tension between a desire to recreate the Golden Age, and another to evolve it in the light of modern culture and values. There is an explosion of interest around the world with places to dance in many cities and towns.