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With a career spanning six decades, the singer left a lasting mark with her irreverence, creativity and hits such as “Mania de Você” (1979) and “Ovelha Negra” (1975). She also publicly addressed her struggles with drug abuse.
Although Ms. Lee regarded her voice as “weak and a little out of tune,” she enjoyed a long run of top-selling albums, including “Rita Lee” (1979) and “Rita Lee and Roberto de Carvalho” (1982). Dozens of her songs were featured in widely watched telenovelas in Latin America. The behemoth television network Globo used her rendition of the song “Poison Weed” in three of its programs.
“I was not born to get married and wash underwear. I wanted the same freedom as the boys who used to play in the street with their toy cars,” she told the Brazilian edition of Rolling Stone in 2008. “When I got into music, I realized that the ‘machos’ reigned absolute, even more in rock music. ‘Wow,’ I said, ‘this is where I’m going to let my fangs out and, literally, give them a hard time.’”
She was a singer and songwriter praised for her versatility, playing at least five instruments: drums, guitar, piano, harmonica and autoharp. She was also one of the first Brazilian musicians to use electric guitar.
Eventually her popularity extended beyond Brazil. She performed in Portugal, England, Spain, France and Germany. In 1988, the British newspaper Daily Mirror revealed that Prince Charles admired her 1981 song “Lança Perfume” (“Spray Perfume”) and considered her his favorite singer. She won a Latin Grammy in the Best Portuguese Language Album category in 2001 for her album “3001.”
Rita Lee Jones was born on Dec. 31, 1947, in São Paulo, the daughter of immigrants from Italy and the United States. Her father’s family, which relocated to Brazil soon after the Civil War, retained many American customs, including speaking English at home, according to a biographical sketch in Contemporary Musicians.
Ms. Lee rose to fame with the group Os Mutantes (The Mutants), starting in 1966. Colors and creativity, as well as irony and irreverence, were Ms. Lee’s trademarks from the start. By the mid-1970s, after selling 200,000 copies of the 1975 album “Forbidden Fruit,” Ms. Lee began to be called the “queen of rock” on the music scene.
In an interview with the music website I Have More Records Than Friends! in 2017, Lulu Santos, judge of the Brazilian version of “The Voice,” recalled seeing Ms. Lee play autoharp at a concert.
“She brought that thing onstage, in those clothes … it was completely mythological,” the musician said. “There really is a lineage of ‘girls’ tied to rock in Brazil, of which she is a legitimate representative. But I see her as an element that distances herself from the cliches of rock. She, from her feminine point of view, sees the clumsiness of the worn-out cliche of the male rocker, the one who plays with his legs open. She saw right through him.”
She was one of the first public figures in Brazil to popularize feminist themes, such as infusing the lyrics of her 1979 song “Mania de Voce” (“Mania for You”) with female sexuality and pleasure. Similar songs followed, such as “Amor e Sexo” (“Love and Sex”), which contrasted the two in detail, and “Lança Perfume,” an ode to unbridled hedonism.
Later in life, she became a vegan and animal rights activist. For decades, she kept her hair bright red and often wore matching glasses, a popular look that she discarded in recent years as she allowed her gray to grow out. She resolved in 2015 to reinvent herself as a white butterfly.
In her autobiography, published the following year, she described the sexual abuse she suffered as a child at the hands of a man who had come to fix her mother’s sewing machine.
She also referred to herself as a “rebel” and “hippie communist,” and wrote of sneaking out the windows of her house as a teenager to play, being arrested during the dictatorship for possession of marijuana, and her multiple stints in rehab clinics for drugs and alcohol.
“I recognize that my best songs were written in an altered state, and my worst too. I only regret my delay in realizing that the ‘medicine’ had long since expired,” she wrote. “My generation suffered the claustrophobia of a brutal dictatorship, and using drugs was a way to breathe airs of freedom.”
In an interview with the television program “Fantastico” in 2020, she explained that physical frailty had prompted her to leave the stage eight years earlier.
“Getting old, for me, was a surprise, because I’ve never been old in my life,” she told the show. “I was left wanting to live my old age away from the stage, without sharing it with the public.”
Survivors include three children and her husband, musician Roberto do Carvalho, with whom she shared a 44-year musical partnership. In 2021, they released a new song, “Change,” and a remix of some of the singer’s biggest hits.
Years before, she imagined her death: “I will be in heaven,” she wrote, “with my soul present playing my autoharp and singing to God, ‘Thank you, Lord, finally sedated.’ Epitaph: She was never a good example, but she was good people.”
Washington Post staff contributed to this report.
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