NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Moraes Moreira, an exuberantly prolific Brazilian songwriter who fused the regional traditions of his home state, Bahia, with an ever-changing array of styles in a career that stretched from the late 1960s through the 2010s, died Monday at his home in Rio de Janeiro. He was 72.

His son Davi Moraes said the cause was a heart attack.

Moreira was the main composer in Os Novos Baianos (the New Bahians), whose early-1970s albums were both hits and cultural milestones in Brazil. Most of their songs had music by Moreira and lyrics by Luiz Galvão.

In 2007, Rolling Stone Brasil named Os Novos Baianos’ 1972 album, “Acabou Chorare” (“The Crying Is Over”) — which mixed, among other things, bossa nova, samba, rock and the vintage Brazilian style called choro — the most important album in the history of Brazilian music.

Moreira moved on to a solo career that would encompass dozens of albums over four decades. His songs were also recorded by many leading Brazilian pop singers, yielding No. 1 hits in Brazil for Gal Costa, Simone, Ney Matogrosso and others.

Moreira constantly forged new hybrids with Bahian roots. His songs, written with a shifting assortment of lyricists, often celebrated Brazil’s multicultural vitality. He helped nationally popularize the Bahian carnival tradition called trio elétrico (electric-guitar bands riding on trucks), and through the decades he also drew on psychedelia, funk, orchestral arrangements, electronic music and rap, as well as Brazilian styles like samba, baião, frevo and afoxé. Bossa nova master João Gilberto, an early mentor of Os Novos Baianos, called Moreira “a cowboy of sound.”

Moreira was born Antônio Carlos Moreira Pires on July 8, 1947, in Ituaçu, in rural Bahia. He learned to play accordion and then guitar in his teens and moved to Salvador, the capital of Bahia, planning to study medicine.

But he was drawn to music instead. He met Tom Zé, a leading songwriter in the Bahia-centered avant-pop movement called tropicalia. “I showed him my stuff and he said: ‘Yeah, you have talent. I’ll give you some guitar lessons. I won’t charge because I know you don’t have the money to pay,’” Moreira told Rolling Stone Brasil.

Zé also connected him to Galvão, starting the songwriting partnership that led to the formation of Os Novos Baianos in 1968; it also included guitarist Pepeu Gomes and singers Baby Consuelo and Paulinho Boca de Cantor. They moved from Salvador to São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro, living and working as a hippie commune and writing songs under the influence of marijuana and LSD, Moreira told interviewers.

He left Os Novos Baianos and released his first solo album, called simply “Moraes Moreira,” in 1975. Through the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, he released an album nearly every year. He sang with the original Bahian trio elétrico, Dodô and Osmar, at Bahia’s carnival in 1976, introducing vocals to what had been an instrumental style.

Moreira celebrated Bahian carnival in songs that became carnival-season hits and in his touring stage shows. Although he decided in the 1980s that the event had grown too commercial, he marked his 50th birthday in 1997 with the album “50 Carnavais” and frequently performed at Salvador’s carnival in the 2000s.

In 1990, he made an album with Pepeu Gomes from Os Novos Baianos. The full group reunited for concerts in 1995 and toured again sporadically from 2016 to 2019. In 2007, Moreira published a memoir, “The History of the New Bahians and Other Verses.”

While he celebrated the 40th anniversary of “Acabou Chorare” at concerts in 2012, he also released a new album that year, “A Revolta dos Ritmos.” He released his last album of new songs, “Ser Tão,” in 2018. (The name means “be so” and is also a pun on sertão, Brazil’s rural northeastern region.) After all Moreira’s stylistic fusions and technological experiments, “Ser Tão” revisited the guitar- and accordion-driven styles he had grown up hearing in Bahia.

Moreira often performed with his son Davi, a guitarist, who survives him, along with another son, Ari Moreira; a daughter, Maria Cecilia Moraes; and three grandchildren.

In March, amid the coronavirus pandemic, Moreira self-quarantined alone at his house in Rio de Janeiro, where he continued to write. On March 18, he posted a poem about quarantine on his Facebook page. In an interview this year with the Brazilian newspaper O Globo, he said he was planning a concert to include more than 20 of his unpublished songs.

Fellow musicians, many of whom had collaborated with him through the years, posted admiring messages on social media. Gilberto Gil, the Bahian songwriter who has also been Brazil’s minister of culture, wrote on Twitter: “A boy from the hinterland of Bahia listened, enchanted, to the music of the world, and made it his expressive universe. He leaves sorrow and a grand body of work.”

Songwriter Caetano Veloso concluded his online tribute by writing: “I remember, I hear, I see. The soul cannot stop crying.”

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