The Girl From Ipanema (6:36)

“The Girl from Ipanema” (“Garota de Ipanema”) is a well-known bossa nova song, 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. The Girl from Ipanema Songfacts explains that Jobim and Moraes were inspired by Helo Pinheiro, a young Brazilian girl who wore a bikini and regularly walked “Like a samba” past the “Veloso” bar that they frequented.

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.