A ballroom dance, similar to a slow rumba, originally from French West Indies and popularized abroad largely through the song "Begin the Beguine"; the music for the dance.
1956, Langston Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander, 2003, Arnold Rampersad, Dolan Hubbard (editors), The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Volume 14: Autobiography, page 69,
It was a haunting kind of beguine with a strange sad lyric about slavery and freedom set against insistent drums and voluptuous maracas: