Frank Sinatra – The Girl From Ipanema Lyrics
Tall and tan and young and lovely
The girl from Ipanema goes walking
And when she passes, each one she passes
Goes "A-a-a-h"
When she walks she's like a samba
That swings so cool and sways so gentle
That when she passes, each one she passes
Goes "A-a-a-h"
Oh, but I watch her so sadly
How can I tell her I love her
Yes, I would give my heart gladly
But each day as she walks to the sea
She looks straight ahead, not at me
Tall and tan and young and lovely
The girl from Ipanema goes walking
And when she passes, I smile, but she
Doesn't see. She just doesn't see
No, she just doesn't
The girl from Ipanema goes walking
And when she passes, each one she passes
Goes "A-a-a-h"
When she walks she's like a samba
That swings so cool and sways so gentle
That when she passes, each one she passes
Goes "A-a-a-h"
Oh, but I watch her so sadly
How can I tell her I love her
Yes, I would give my heart gladly
But each day as she walks to the sea
She looks straight ahead, not at me
Tall and tan and young and lovely
The girl from Ipanema goes walking
And when she passes, I smile, but she
Doesn't see. She just doesn't see
No, she just doesn't
Summer 1962. Rio de Janeiro. At the Veloso Bar, a block from the beach at Ipanema, two friends—the composer Antonio Carlos Jobim and the poet Vinícius de Moraes—are drinking Brahma beer and musing about their latest song collaboration.The duo favor the place for the good brew and the even better girl-watching opportunities. Though both are married men, they’re not above a little ogling. Especially when it comes to a neighborhood girl nicknamed Helô. Eighteen-year-old Heloisa Eneida Menezes Pais Pinto is a Carioca—a native of Rio. She’s tall and tan, with emerald green eyes and long, dark wavy hair. They’ve seen her passing by, as she’s heading to the beach or coming home from school. She has a way of walking that de Moraes calls “sheer poetry.”
Legend has it that Jobim and de Moraes were so inspired by this shapely coed, they wrote a song for her right on the bar napkins. It’s a good story, but it’s not quite true.
Following their success composing songs for the 1959 film Black Orpheus, the writers began work on a musical comedy. Conceived by de Moraes, it was called Blimp and concerned a Martian who arrives in Rio during the height of Carnaval. And what might impress a little green man the most about our planet? A beautiful girl in a bikini, of course.
Jobim and de Moraes were stalled two verses in on the song they called “Menina que Passa” (“The Girl Who Passes By”). They needed a fresh breeze of inspiration, something vivid to stir their alien visitor’s blood. Conjuring up the vision of their favorite hip-swaying distraction, they poured out all their secret longing and lust into the newly titled “Garota da Ipanema.”
Though Blimp never got off the ground, the tune became not only a hit in Brazil, but the international calling card for a style of music that charmed the world—bossa nova.
While Helô inspired the song, it was another Carioca who carried it beyond Rio. Astrud Gilberto was just the wife of singing star João Gilberto when she entered a NYC studio in March 1963. João and Jobim were making a record with tenor saxman Stan Getz. The idea of cutting a verse on “Ipanema” in English came up, and Astrud was the only one of the Brazilians who spoke more than phrasebook English.
Astrud’s child-like vocal, devoid of vibrato and singerly mannerisms, was the perfect foil for her husband’s soft bumblebee voice. Jobim tinkled piano. Getz blew a creamy smooth tenor. Four minutes of magic went to tape.
A year later, the song was casting its quiet spell of sea and sand on the charts, washing past the Beatles’ “I Want To Hold Your Hand.” It peaked in mid-June at No. 5, selling over two million copies.
“The Girl From Ipanema” went on to become the second-most recorded popular song in history, behind “Yesterday.” Covered by an A-Z gamut of performers, it’s become the ultimate cliché of elevator music—shorthand for the entire lounge revival of the ’90s.
Over the years, Helô Pinheiro (her married name) enjoyed country-wide fame, ranking with Pelé as one of the goodwill ambassadors of Brazil. She never settled on an occupation, dabbling in acting, then running a modeling agency. In 1987, she posed nude for Playboy (and again in 2003, with her daughter Ticiane). In 2001, Helô opened the Girl From Ipanema clothing boutique in a Rio shopping center.
Shortly after, the heirs of Jobim (who died in 1994) and de Moraes (who died in 1980) filed a lawsuit, claiming Helô was only inadvertently involved in the song’s creation and didn’t have the right to use it for commercial purposes.
Helô says, “I never made a cent from ‘The Girl From Ipanema,’ nor do I claim that I should. Yet now that I’m using a legally registered trademark, they want to prohibit me from being the girl from Ipanema. I’m sure that Antonio and Vinícius would never question the use of the name.”
After much ugliness in and out of court, Helô was able to keep the name for her boutique. Today, she reflects on the early ’60s in Ipanema with nostalgia. “I like the time when everything was prettier because of love, as it says in the Portuguese version of the song. I am still touched when somebody plays the song in my honor.”
—By Bill DeMain
From Performing Songwriter Issue 98, December 2006
| "The Girl from Ipanema" | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Single by Stan Getz and João Gilberto | |
| from the album Getz/Gilberto | |
| Released | 25 July 1964 |
| Genre |
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| Label | Verve |
| Writer(s) |
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| Producer(s) | Creed Taylor |
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"The Girl from Ipanema"
Astrud Gilberto, along with João Gilberto and Stan Getz's "The Girl from Ipanema" from Getz/Gilberto
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| Problems playing this file? See media help. | |
"Garota de Ipanema" ("The Girl from Ipanema") is a Brazilian bossa nova jazz song. It was a worldwide hit in the mid-1960s and won a Grammy for Record of the Year in 1965. It was written in 1962, with music by Antônio Carlos Jobim and Portuguese lyrics by Vinicius de Moraes. English lyrics were written later by Norman Gimbel.
The first commercial recording was in 1962, by Pery Ribeiro. The 1964 single featuring Astrud Gilberto and Stan Getz became an international hit. This had been shortened from the version on the album Getz/Gilberto (recorded in March 1963, released March 1964) which had also included the Portuguese lyrics sung by Joao Gilberto. In the US, the single peaked at number five on the BillboardHot 100, and went to number one for two weeks on the Easy Listening chart.Overseas it peaked at number 29 in the United Kingdom, and charted highly throughout the world.
Numerous recordings have been used in films, sometimes as an elevator music cliché. It is believed to be the second most recorded pop song in history, after "Yesterday" by The Beatles. The song was inducted into the Latin Grammy Hall of Fame in 2001. In 2004, it was one of 50 recordings chosen that year by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry. In 2009, the song was voted by the Brazilian edition of Rolling Stone as the 27th greatest Brazilian song
History
Ipanema is a fashionable seaside neighborhood located in the southern region of the city of Rio de Janeiro.
The song was composed for a musical comedy titled Dirigível (Blimp), then a work-in-progress of Vinícius de Moraes. The original title was "Menina que Passa" ("The Girl Who Passes By"); the first verse was different. Jobim composed the melody on his piano in his new house in Rua Barão da Torre, in Ipanema. In turn, Moraes had written the lyrics in Petrópolis, near Rio de Janeiro, as he had done with "Chega de Saudade" ("No More Blues") six years earlier.
During a recording session in New York with João Gilberto, Antonio Carlos Jobim and Stan Getz, the idea of cutting an English-language version came up. Norman Gimbel wrote the English lyrics. João's wife, Astrud Gilberto, was the only one of the Brazilians who could speak English well and was chosen to sing. Her voice, without trained singer mannerisms, proved a perfect fit for the song.
The song was inspired by Heloísa Eneida Menezes Paes Pinto (now Helô Pinheiro), a seventeen-year-old girl living on Montenegro Street in Ipanema. Daily, she would stroll past the Veloso bar-café, not just to the beach ("each day when she walks to the sea"), but in the everyday course of her life. She would sometimes enter the bar to buy cigarettes for her mother and leave to the sound of wolf-whistles In the winter of 1962, the composers saw the girl pass by the bar. Since the song became popular, she has become a celebrity.
In Revelação: a verdadeira Garota de Ipanema (Revealed: The Real Girl from Ipanema) Moraes wrote that she was "the paradigm of the young Carioca: a golden teenage girl, a mixture of flower and mermaid, full of light and grace, the sight of whom is also sad, in that she carries with her, on her route to the sea, the feeling of youth that fades, of the beauty that is not ours alone—it is a gift of life in its beautiful and melancholic constant ebb and flow."
Legal disputes
In 2001, the song's copyright owners (heirs of their composer fathers) sued Pinheiro for using the title of the song as the name of her boutique (Garota de Ipanema). In their complaint, they stated that her status as The Girl from Ipanema (Garota de Ipanema) does not entitle her to use a name that legally belongs to them. Public support was strongly in favor of Pinheiro. A press release by Jobim and Moraes, the composers, in which they had named Pinheiro as the real Girl from Ipanema (Garota de Ipanema) was evidence that they had intended to bestow this title on her. The court ruled in favor of Pinheiro.
In a separate legal dispute, Astrud Gilberto sued Frito-Lay for trademark infringement for using the song in a TV ad for its baked potato chips. Gilberto argued that
In Oliveria v. Frito-Lay Inc. (2001), her claims were rejected by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
The Boy from Ipanema
A parody of the song, with different lyrics written by Stephen Sondheim, is entitled The Boy From.... Another parody is The Girl With Emphysema by comedian Bob Rivers.When sung by female artists the song has often been rendered as "The Boy from Ipanema", such as by Peggy Lee (1964), Ella Fitzgerald (1965), and Shirley Bassey (1966). Petula Clarksang it in 1977 on The Muppet Show. Diana Krall recorded it on her 2009 album Quiet Nights.
The phrase "Boy from Ipanema" (but nothing from the song) appears in Norwegian recording artist Annie's "Anthonio". (Likewise, the phrase "Girl from Ipanema" appears in The B-52's' 1985 single "Girl from Ipanema Goes to Greenland," again without any musical reference to the song)
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