Méringue
Dance music of Haiti. It is a string-based style played on the lute, guitar, horn section, piano, and other string instruments, unlike the accordion-based merengue, and is generally sung in Haitian Creole and French, as well as in English and Spanish. Méringue was heavily influenced by the contredanse from Europe and then by Afro-Caribbean influences from Hispaniola.
The term “meringue,” a whipped egg and sugar confection popular in 18th-century France, was adopted presumably because it captured the essence of the light nature of the dance where one gracefully shifts one’s weight between feet in a very fluid movement. Méringue was claimed by both elite and proletarian Haitian audiences as a representative expression of Haitian cultural values. 1850s–1950s.