Even though he didn't pursue an academic musical career,[2] his remarkable skills opened the doors to various chorões in Rio de Janeiro.

In his early days, he would perform and improvise with other chorões in cafés, nightclubs, and cinemas in order to make his living.

[3] This later enabled him to compose many pieces inspired by the musical style and folk material of chorões, entitled chôros.

The Suite was initially completed for publication in the summer of 1928, while he was on vacation at Lussac-les-Châteaux with his wife, Lucilia Guimarães, visiting Spanish pianist Tomás Terán.

Villa-Lobos confessed to Eugène Cools, the then-director of Éditions Max Eschig, in a letter dated July 28, 1928, that not a page of music had been composed, and he was busy with his kites, one of his favorite pastimes.

When Villa-Lobos came back to Brazil, supposedly for a brief series of concerts on June 15, 1930, he would not be able to return because of a coup d'etat where dictator Getúlio Vargas became president.

While it was fairly easy for Villa-Lobos to reconstruct his études because of the readily available material he owned at the time, the Suite was more challenging to re-compose, and this is made evident by the fact that the fourth movement, the "Valse-Chôro", was lost (Villa-Lobos only had sketches of bars 78 to 104) and the composer had to start from scratch more than twenty years after composing it.

The lost fourth movement from the first preliminary set was eventually found many years after the composer's death, in 2006, in the archives of Villa-Lobos's publisher.

[6] All the movements in the suite are chôros, pieces of music that meant to re-phrase and synthesize native Brazilian folk material.