One song has stuck with Julio Cuellar Gonzales for practically his entire life. Among his first memories of church in the 1970s in Villa Serrano, a town in the Bolivian region of Chuquisaca, Cuellar remembers singing a specific version of the Our Father.
At the time, Cuellar thought it was written by a priest. He didn’t imagine that the beloved Our Father’s tune was actually written by Paul Simon for Simon & Garfunkel’s 1960s hit “The Sound of Silence.”
The words were different from the typical Our Father prayer. “Our Father, who art in those who truly love. May the kingdom that you promised us come soon to our hearts. The love that your son left us, may that love dwell in us,” began the song that Cuellar sang in Spanish. In the middle of the song, as a zampoña, a traditional Andean pan flute, played the melody, parishioners said the traditional Our Father together with the words from Matthew 6.
From Villa Serrano, “The Sound of Silence” Our Father followed Cuellar when he moved to Santa Cruz de la Sierra, the largest city in Bolivia. “This was one of the people’s favorite songs and ours too,” he said.
Years later, after working on cruise ships in Mexico and then immigrating to Virginia, he found a Spanish Mass and heard it again. “It connected me to my childhood,” he said.
Pedro Rubalcava, the director of Oregon Catholic Press’ label group, said that “The Sound of Silence” version of the Our Father has been widespread throughout Latin America and U.S. Latino communities for the last few decades. There are variations in the words and instrumentation in different communities.
For Cuellar, even when he finally learned the tune’s origin, it still felt Andean to him: “It sounds to me like the melancholy, the melody, the sweetness of the music of the Andes.”
While there’s no proof that Simon took inspiration for “The Sound of Silence” from the Andes, he later used an Andean tune in “El Condor Pasa,” a single on Simon & Garfunkel’s Grammy-winning 1970 album, “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”
While Simon recorded the vocals with permission over a recording by a French Andean band, Los Incas, believing that the melody came from a folk tune, the melody actually came from Daniel Alomía Robles’ 1913 Peruvian musical theater piece called “El Cóndor Pasa.”
Valdimar Hafstein, a professor of folkloristics/ethnology at the University of Iceland, wrote in a 2018 book, “Making Intangible Heritage: El Condor Pasa and Other Stories From UNESCO,” that, given Robles’ travel through the Amazon and Andes to collect myths and music, part of a widespread tradition of “collector-composers,” it can be hard to describe the tune as either Robles’ original or an arrangement.
When Robles’ son sued Simon because his father’s composition was registered in the U.S. copyright system, Simon settled, with the son calling it “almost a friendly case.”
“The Sound of Silence” Our Father came back into Cuellar’s life when he decided to begin recording Christian music after years of focusing on secular music.
