Lou Bega — "Mambo No. 5 (A Little Bit of...)"

German singer Lou Bega — Munich-born, to Ugandan and Sicilian parents — built "Mambo No. 5 (A Little Bit of...)" on Dámaso Pérez Prado's instrumental of the same name, composed and recorded in 1949 and released in 1950. Bega's version sampled the riffs from Prado's original recording and laid entirely new lyrics on top: the "little bit of" hook and the name-checked parade of Angela, Pamela, Sandra, and Rita. His producers arranged royalties with Prado's publisher before release — and after a seven-year legal battle, Germany's Federal Court of Justice ruled in 2008 that the track stands as a new song co-written by Prado and Bega.

Released in Europe in April 1999, it conquered the continent before America ever heard it: number one in roughly twenty countries, two weeks at number one in the UK on its way to becoming a million-seller there, and an astonishing twenty weeks at number one in France — a French chart record. In the US it peaked at number three on the Hot 100 that fall and sold around three million copies, making it one of the defining hits of the swing-and-Latin-revival moment despite never actually topping the American chart (a detail almost nobody remembers correctly).

The afterlife was kid-sized: in February 2000 Disney issued an official version rewritten around Mickey, Goofy, and friends, cementing the song's second life as elementary-school-dance canon. Bega never returned to the American top 40, and "Mambo No. 5" remains the rare one-hit wonder that put a mambo composed a half-century earlier back atop the world's charts — with its late composer credited all over again.