THE REAL GIRL FROM IPANEMA

The endlessly covered Brazilian song turns 50 this year. What explains its quirky endurance?

Before 1962, if John Q. Nobody gave any thought to South America at all, it probably didn't range much beyond banana republics, fugitive Nazis and Carmen Miranda. That changed 50 years ago this summer when a tall and tan and young and lovely goddess was born.

She was "The Girl From Ipanema."(click below to read more)

Like a handful of other international crossover hits ("Day-O" from Jamaica, "Down Under" from Australia), "The Girl From Ipanema" pretty much put an entire country's music and ethos on the map. In this case, the land was Brazil, the genre was bossa nova, and the atmosphere was uniquely exotic and elusive—a seductive tropical cocktail "just like a samba that swings so cool and sways so gently," as the lyrics go.

At the time, bossa nova wasn't exactly unknown in the U.S., as shown by the Grammy-winning success of "Desafinado" from the 1962 album "Jazz Samba" by Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd. But "The Girl From Ipanema" ("Garota de Ipanema" in the original Portuguese) was something else altogether. Not only was it one of the last great gasps of pre-Beatles easy listening, it was an entire culture in miniature.

"To the layperson, 'The Girl From Ipanema' sounds like 'a nice song,' " says the Brazilian-American guitarist and musical director Manny Moreira. "But to the trained ear it is perfection."

In the half-century since its genesis, "The Girl From Ipanema" has become inescapable. According to Performing Songwriter magazine, it is the second-most-recorded pop tune ever, surpassed only by "Yesterday." Sammy Davis Jr. sang it on "I Dream of Jeannie"; it is part of the repertoire of the Yale Whiffenpoofs.

And, yes, it has become archetypal Muzak. Get put on hold often enough, wander through enough retail stores or tacky cocktail lounges, and sooner or later its limpid strains will caress you. At the climax of the 1980 movie "The Blues Brothers," hundreds of gun-toting police officers, state troopers and other riotous authority figures scramble after John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd as they calmly ride a Chicago City Hall elevator while being soothed by a piped-in instrumental version.

Clearly, this is art for the ages. But why?

One reason is the girl of the title. The embodiment of sultry pulchritude, she is also utterly unobtainable: "But each day when she walks to the sea/She looks straight ahead, not at me."

"It's the oldest story in the world," says Norman Gimbel, who wrote the English lyrics. "The beautiful girl goes by, and men pop out of manholes and fall out of trees and are whistling and going nuts, and she just keeps going by. That's universal."

So reasoned composer Antônio Carlos Jobim and poet Vinícius de Moraes five decades ago. Stalled on a number for a musical called "Blimp," they sought inspiration at the Veloso, a seaside cafe in the Ipanema neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro. There they remembered a local teenager, the 5-foot-8-inch, dark-haired, green-eyed Heloísa Eneida Menezes Paes Pinto, whom they often saw walking to the beach or entering the bar to buy cigarettes for her mother. And so they penned a paean to a vision.

Originally crooned by the popular Brazilian singer Pery Ribeiro (who died in February), "Garota de Ipanema" went over well enough in its home country. Then the U.S. music publisher Lou Levy asked Mr. Gimbel to devise an English cover. With Mr. Jobim on piano, Stan Getz on sax, João Gilberto on guitar and Portuguese vocals, and Mr. Gilberto's wife, Astrud, handling English vocals, the U.S. version was cut for the album "Getz/Gilberto" in March 1963.

While Mr. Gilberto's soft Portuguese sets the tone for the song, it is his wife's English response that still captivates after all this time. By all rights, it shouldn't. Although Astrud could speak the language, her delivery was decidedly unpolished. "Before the recording, I had never sung professionally," she says on her website—and you can hear it. Often she emphasizes the wrong sounds and seems to be enunciating phonetically. Her very first word, "tall," comes across as "doll." Contrary to Mr. Gimbel's lyrics, she sings, "She looks straight ahead not at he." It was supposed to be "me."

"I was tearing my hair out when I learned that later," Mr. Gimbel says. "It upset me no end."

But when combined with her tentative delivery, Mr. Getz's breathy sax and Mr. Jobim's gentle piano, the errors make the result ever so slightly foreign—just out of reach, like the girl herself, and thus irresistible.

"The Girl From Ipanema" went on to win the Grammy for record of the year in 1965 and was guaranteed immortality that same year when Heloísa was revealed as its inspiration. Today, as Helo Pinheiro, still stunning at 66, she is a local celebrity, happy to give interviews and pose for photos. Unlike her ethereal counterpart, she is personable indeed.

And that, perhaps, is ultimate reason why the song endures: The remote, mythic beauty—the impossible dream—turned out to be as real as you or me.