Yay! It’s Song Lyric Sunday again. This week Jim Adams has asked us to explore elevator music. One song immediately comes to mind: The Girl from Ipanema.

The Story

The song was inspired by Heloísa Eneida Menezes Paes Pinto (now known as Helô Pinheiro), a seventeen-year-old girl living on Montenegro Street in Ipanema.^[11] 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.^[12] 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 Garôta 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.”

The song was composed for a musical comedy titled Dirigível (“Airship“), then a work in progress of Vinicius 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. While firmly rooted in bossa nova, “The Girl from Ipanema” includes influences from blues and Tin Pan Alley.

Frank Sinatra recorded the song with Jobim in 1967 for their album Francis Albert Sinatra & Antônio Carlos Jobim.^[9]Ella Fitzgerald recorded it for her two-disc set of Brazilian music Ella Abraça Jobim, released by Pablo Today in 1981. Ethel Ennis and Nat King Cole have also both recorded the song. In 2021, Brazilian singer Anitta interpolated the main melody from “Garota de Ipanema” for the song “Girl from Rio”, released as the fourth single from his sophomore album of the same title. ~Wikipedia

The Lyrics

Tall and tan and young and lovely
The girl from Ipanema goes walking
And when she passes
Each one she passes goes, “Ah”

When she walks, she’s like a samba
That swings so cool and sways so gently
That when she passes
Each one she passes goes, “Ah”

Oh, but he watches her so sadly
How can he tell her he loves her?
Yes, he would give his heart gladly
But each day, when she walks to the sea
She looks straight ahead, not at he

Tall, and tan, and young, and lovely
The girl from Ipanema goes walking
And when she passes, he smiles
But she doesn’t see

Oh, but he sees her so sadly
How can he tell her he loves her?
Yes, he would give his heart gladly
But each day, when she walks to the sea
She looks straight ahead, not at him

Tall, and tan, and young, and lovely
The girl from Ipanema goes walking
And when she passes, he smiles
But she doesn’t see

She just doesn’t see
No, she doesn’t see
But she doesn’t see
She doesn’t see
No, she doesn’t see

Songwriters: N. Gimbel, V. De Moreas, A.c. Jobim

For non-commercial use only.Data from: Musixmatch

The Video