The Girl From Ipanema

The picture of Ipanema Beach, city of Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil

"The Girl from Ipanema" ("Garota de Ipanema") is a brasilian music or bossa nova song (brazilian jazz), a worldwide hit in the mid-1960s that won a Grammy for Record of the Year in 1965. It was written in 1962, with music by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Portuguese lyrics by Vinicius de Moraes with English lyrics written later by Norman Gimbel. It was also famously sung and played by Jobim in 1965 on the Andy Williams show.

The first commercial recording was in 1962, by Pery Ribeiro. The version performed by Astrud Gilberto, along with João Gilberto and Stan Getz, from the 1963 album Getz/Gilberto, became an international hit, reaching #5 in the U.S., #29 in the UK, and charting highly throughout the world. Numerous recordings have been used in movies, sometimes as an elevator music cliché (for example, near the end of The Blues Brothers).

In 2004, it was one of 50 recordings chosen that year by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry.

Although Astrud Gilberto's original version was "The Girl from Ipanema", when covered by other female artists the song has often been rendered as "The Boy from Ipanema", with gender-specific lyrics.

This is the girl of Ipanema



Tall and tan and young and lovely and now 62 or 63 years old, depending on whom you ask, Heloisa Pinheiro -- the one and only woman who inspired "The Girl From Ipanema" -- has never made a single cents off the song.

Myth has it The Girl from Ipanema was inspired by Heloísa Eneida Menezes Paes Pinto (now Helô Pinheiro), a fifteen-year-old girl living in Montenegro Street of the fashionable Ipanema district of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Daily, she would stroll past the popular "Veloso" bar-café on her way to the beach, attracting the attention of regulars Jobim and Moraes.

In fact, the song originally was composed for a musical comedy titled Dirigível (Blimp), then a work-in-progress of Vinícius de Moraes. The song's original title was Menina que Passa (The Girl Who Passes By); the famous first verse was different. Jobim meticulously composed the melody on his piano in his new house in Rua Barão da Torre, in Ipanema. In turn, Vinícius had written the lyrics in Petrópolis, near Rio de Janeiro, as he had done with Chega de Saudade six years earlier.

The myth is true in that the composers did know Helô Pinto, and later attributed the song's composition to her. In the winter of 1962, they watched her pass by the Veloso bar, not just to the beach, but in the quotidian course of her life. The Veloso bar, renamed "A Garota de Ipanema" - The Girl From Ipanema, by its owners, still exists in Ipanema. It is easy to imagine why they noticed her — Helô was a five-foot-eight-inch-tall (1.73m) gimlet-eyed brunette living in Rua Montenegro, already the objet du désir of many of Veloso patrons, where she would enter to buy cigarettes (for her mother) and leave to a flattering wolf-whistle soundtrack.Since the song became popular, she has become a celebrity.