‘‘I listen to and like all kinds of music, from bossa nova to country, and every once in a while I’ll take a risk.’’

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.”

No Latin American has sold more records than Roberto Carlos, whose current North American tour wraps up a year’s worth of events commemorating half a century as a recording artist. Ask him to explain the secret of his long success, and the answer hints at his chameleon character and tastes.

“I listen to and like all kinds of music, from bossa nova to country, and every once in a while I’ll take a risk,” the singer, who turned 69 last month , said . “But rock ‘n’ roll, that backbeat and that instrumentation, is always in my style, even if it’s smoothed out a bit.”

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 until he managed to get a recording contract as a solo artist.

In that early stage, 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 talent for divining what would appeal to the recordbuying public, usually writing with a friend and band mate from his teenage years, Erasmo Carlos Esteves.

That partnership continues to this day . Brazilian critics like to compare the duo to Lennon and McCartney .

In the mid-1960s Roberto Carlos started recording in Spanish as well as Portuguese . As he evolved into a romantic crooner, his popularity skyrocketed and spread all the way to Mexico, rivaling that of Julio Iglesias.

Since the ‘70s most of his most popular compositions - like “Details,” “Beloved Lover” and “Breakfast” - have been romantic ballads .

Yet even when he is singing an upbeat tune, his voice is suffused with a certain melancholy. His life has not been easy: he lost part of a leg in a railway accident as a child; his son, Roberto Jr., is blind; and in 1999 his third wife, Maria Rita, whom he has called the love of his life and the inspiration for his most romantic songs, died of cancer at 38.

During the ‘90s Roberto Carlos also fell victim to an obsessive-compulsive disorder. That prevented him from singing some of his biggest hits, which contain certain words that had become taboo to him, like “evil” and “lie,” and reinforced his onstage tics, like appearing against a blue background and always wearing white.

But in 2004 he went public with his problem and announced that he was getting treatment. Perhaps as a result his performances have seemed reinvigorated in recent years.

“I always felt comfortable on the stage and never thought that O.C.D. messed with me when I was up there,” he said when asked about the problem. “It’s true there were some songs I didn’t sing at all and others where I’d avoid one word or another and have to find a substitute. But I’ve gone back to singing many of them, and I hope to sing them all.”


By LARRY ROHTER