The newspaper The New York Times tells a little story of the Brazilian star: 
ROBERTO CARLOS has been so large a pop music presence for so long that when he first emerged he was nicknamed “the Elvis Presley of Brazil” and once opened a show there for Bill Haley and His Comets. But 50 years, 120 million records and various stylistic shifts later, he is more often described as “the Frank Sinatra of Latin America.”
Born Roberto Carlos Braga in a small town in the interior of Brazil, he first performed on a local radio station at age 9. Inspired by Presley and Little Richard, he went to Rio as a teenager, singing and playing guitar for bands with names like the Sputniks until he managed to get a recording contract as a solo artist.
In that early stage, as leader of what became known as the Young Guard movement, Roberto Carlos had some of his biggest successes with cover versions of American rock ’n’ roll and pop hits like “Splish Splash,” “Road Hog,” “Unchain My Heart,” “Alley-Oop” and “The Wanderer.” But around 1965 he began to emerge as a songwriter with a knack for divining what would appeal to the record-buying public, usually writing with a friend and band mate from his teenage years, Erasmo Carlos Esteves.
In the mid-1960s Roberto Carlos also started recording in Spanish with an eye on the market in neighboring Argentina. But as he evolved into a romantic crooner, fond of Sinatra and Tony Bennett and boleros and other Latin tearjerker styles, his popularity skyrocketed and spread northward, all the way to Mexico, rivaling that of Julio Iglesias.
