Rumba – it’s sung by French Gypsies, which is where the Gypsy Kings come in, there’s a whole Rumba Catalana scene, and there are tons of groups I’d probably know more about if I had grown up in Spain. Weirdly, Rumba is one of the hardest Palos to define in flamenco. Or maybe it’s the easiest. Either way, Rumba encompasses all sorts of stuff in flamenco, and in a way it’s the basket into which we throw everything that is otherwise impossible to categorize. It’s also the closest thing flamenco has to pop music. The easy answer is that Rumba is another Palo in flamenco, it’s in 4/4 time, and it generally has an accent on the 2+ (or you can think of it as being a 4/4 meter that’s subdivided into 3+3+2). And that’s it! It can be fast, slow or in between, it can be in any key you can think of and the lyrics can be about anything. It’s generally recognized as one of the Cantes de Ida y Vuelta, which are the songs the sailors brought back from the New World when they went off to discover and colonize the Americas.