A teenager's beach walk became bossa nova's global signature
Garota de Ipanema—The Girl from Ipanema—was written in 1962 by Antônio Carlos Jobim with Portuguese words by Vinícius de Moraes and later English lyrics by Norman Gimbel. The Stan Getz take featuring Astrud Gilberto's debut vocal became a mid-1960s worldwide hit and won the 1965 Grammy for Record of the Year.
Jobim shaped the tune at his new Ipanema piano; Moraes wrote verses in Petrópolis for a comedy then called Dirigível. The working title was Menina que Passa. Pery Ribeiro cut the first commercial disc in 1962. During a New York session with João Gilberto, Jobim, and Getz, Gimbel's English text was tried; Astrud, the only Brazilian present with strong English, sang and was paid just $120 with neither credit nor royalties at first. The album Getz/Gilberto (March 1964) carried Portuguese and English; the shortened single reached No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 and topped Easy Listening for two weeks.
The muse was seventeen-year-old Heloísa Pinheiro, who passed the Veloso bar on Montenegro Street toward the sea. Moraes later called her the paradigm of the young Carioca. The song is often ranked the second-most-recorded pop number after the Beatles' Yesterday; the 1964 Getz–Gilberto release entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2000, the Latin Grammy Hall of Fame in 2001, and the National Recording Registry in 2004.
Rio's 2016 Olympics named mascots Vinicius and Tom after the writers and staged an opening segment around the tune. Pinheiro later won a boutique-name lawsuit against the composers' heirs, while Astrud Gilberto's trademark suit against Frito-Lay over a chip ad failed on appeal. Keys shift by market—G for Ribeiro, often D-flat in Brazil, F in many American versions—yet the swaying cadence still signals Ipanema worldwide.
Source: The Girl from Ipanema
