September 1: Singer and songwriter Gloria Estefan is 56-years-old today.

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Born Gloria María Milagrosa Fajardo García, the Cuban-American singer, songwriter and actress is in the top 100 best selling music artists with over 90 million albums sold worldwide - 26 million of them in the U.S. She has won seven Grammy Awards.

At age 18, Gloria was invited to sing at a wedding with a local band called the Miami Latin Boys. The group’s leader was Emilio Estefan. The singer quickly became an integral part of the band. Between 1975 and 1977, they polished their sound creating what would be called the “Miami sound”; and the group became the Miami Sound Machine. The day after her 21st birthday she married Emilio.                                                        
In 1984 the band hit it big with the recording of their first album in English, “Eyes of Innocence.” Less than a year later, they released a new album, album “Primitive Love,” which sold more than 3 million copies in the U.S., and produced the hit singles "Bad Boy," "Words Get In The Way"’ and "Conga." "Conga" was the first record in history to appear simultaneously in Billboard’s Pop, Latin, Soul and Dance charts.
 
The next two albums, “Let It Loose” (1987) and “Cuts Both Ways” (1989), were also smash hits, with “Cuts Both Ways,” selling more than 10 million copies. By this time, the name of the group changed to Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine.

Besides her seven Grammy's, Gloria has been honored twice by the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In 1993, she was granted an honorary doctoral degree in music from the University of Miami. In 2007 she and her husband, Emilio, received honorary doctoral degrees in music from the Berklee College of Music in Boston.

Press an album cover below for access to ENTIRE Amazon Website:

Estefan's new dance-oriented studio album, Miss Little Havana, was released in the United States on September 27, 2011, with the physical CD available exclusively at Target. Early on, Estefan had described the album as a project in the vein of her 1998 hit album gloria!

In the fall of 2011, Estefan began hosting Gloria Estefan's Latin Beat, a seven-part series for BBC Radio 2 in the United Kingdom that explores the history of Latin music.

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For more about Gloria, visit her Website at-

http://gloriaestefan.com/

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