Celia & Johnny came out on New York’s Fania Records, a label as synonymous with salsa as Stax Records is with soul. Fania made salsa nationally popular during the late ‘60s to early ‘70s, and Celia & Johnny was one of their biggest hits… But let’s back up a little bit.

When Celia & Johnny was released in 1974, Celia was already a huge star in her native Cuba. After defecting to the States, though, she struggled to break into the salsa scene. Fania co-founder and Fania All-Stars bandleader Johnny Pacheco, meanwhile, was one of contemporary Latin music’s biggest stars. Johnny was a huge fan of Celia’s, but felt that her first forays into the American music scene–recorded with the Tito Puente Orchestra for Tico Records–tended to obscure her powerful voice. As Johnny once told music critic Juan Moreno-Velázquez, “Celia sounded good with a stick banging against a can. She didn’t need all those instruments.”

Johnny was sure that packaging Celia’s agile contralto and improvisational brilliance with his hip, danceable Afro-Caribbean grooves would increase her appeal with American audiences, but even he had no idea how enthusiastically the album would be received: Backed by the Pacheco groove, Celia achieved two career-defining hits, “Toro Mata” and “Quimbara.” Both were met with wild acclaim by dancers, who immediately coronated Celia as the Queen of Salsa, a genre soon to take the world by storm.

Today, the Seventies is considered the golden age of salsa and Celia Cruz as one of the genre’s most iconic figureheads – Celia & Johnny is an essential piece of that history.