I’d like to tell you a story about a Brazilian musician you’ve probably never heard of. Her name is Joyce Moreno; she is 66 and has been singing and composing professionally for 47 years, during which time she has made more than 30 recordings. I flipped for her music when I first heard her last spring at Birdland, in Midtown Manhattan, and I’ve been listening to her, more or less obsessively, ever since.

But that’s not the reason I want to tell you about her. A few months after I first heard her play, we struck up an email correspondence. When Joyce came to New York in September for an engagement, my wife and I had dinner with her and her husband, the Brazilian drummer Tutty Moreno. And during my recent trip to Rio de Janeiro, I interviewed her, figuring that I would write about her when I got back. Somewhat to my surprise, what has stuck with me from those encounters has less to do with her music, glorious though I think it is, and more to do with the way she has conducted her career. She has lessons to teach that go well beyond music.

Joyce’s career began in controversy. When she was 19, she wrote a song that began, “I was told that my man doesn’t love me.”

In the Brazil of that era, her blunt, first-person, female-centric lyric was considered by many to be vulgar — not the sort of thing a woman was supposed to sing about.

“It was strange,” she told me — bewildering to be at the center of such a storm at such a young age. But she never backed down from the way she approached her songwriting. In a country that didn’t exactly embrace feminism, she was always a staunch feminist, and that’s reflected in some of her best lyrics.

As is true for every Brazilian of her generation, she also had to deal with the military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985. In December 1968, the dictatorship issued a decree that, among other things, instituted broad censorship of the arts. Some of the country’s most important musicians, like Gilberto Gil, were imprisoned and then sent into exile.

Other musicians and artists had to submit their work to the censors. Joyce recalls that she was forbidden to use words like “pregnant” in her songs.

“I was censored because I had a feminine point of view,” she says. By 1980, however, the worst of the censorship had ended, and Joyce recorded a song called “Feminina,” which became, in many ways, her anthem.

“Oh, Ma,” it begins. “Please explain to me, teach meTell me, what is feminine?

It’s not in the hair, the mojo or the lookIt’s being a female everywhere.”

In the early 1980s, she had a handful of small hits, “Feminina” included. But, says Nelson Motta, a Brazilian writer and producer, “her music has never been very commercial from a Brazilian standpoint,” and, over time, she became someone who was more respected than listened to.

Several times during her career, she seemed on the cusp of breaking out. Once, early in her career, she recorded an album produced by Claus Ogerman, who had arranged songs for Antônio Carlos Jobim and Frank Sinatra. For reasons that have never been clear to her, the album was never released. “It was painful,” she told me, “but I lived with it.”

Years later, Verve signed her to a two-record contract. As is so often the case, however, the label and the musician had very different ideas about what the recordings should sound like. “They said they liked what I was doing,” she told me, “but then they wanted me to do something completely different.” Joyce found the experience miserable, and it reinforced her belief that she could be happy only by staying true to herself, no matter what effect that had on her career.

And so it has been. She is more popular in Japan than she is in Brazil. She cuts her own records, even though it means she often has to pay for it out of her pocket. “It is a way of preserving my independence as an artist,” she said.

“Joyce has never worried about being popular,” says Motta. When I saw her give a concert in Rio de Janeiro in December, there were maybe 250 people in the hall — and the admission was free. I felt disappointed for her, but it didn’t bother her at all. Afterward, she autographed copies of her new CD and posed for pictures. When I asked her about it, she said, “I’m fine with where my career is. I’ve had a very lucky life.”

Would that we could all so easily make our peace with what life throws us — the good, the bad and everything in between.