A Lord's Prayer song

The things you find on the Internet.  So I was getting ready to do my part in discussing the Lord's Prayer for RCIA.  Well, we didn't get around to it.  But in my searching around for inspiration, I stumbled across this musical take on the Lord's Prayer from the early 1970s:



The funny thing about this is, I've wondered about that tune all my life.  Since I became Christian, I've heard various musical versions of the Lord's Prayer, including one version set to music that I've heard when we recite the Our Father during Mass.  But I've wondered all along if this was just in my imagination or not, since I never, ever heard it at any time in my Christian life.

One reason that something I've not found (until now) was there buzzing about my recollections had to do with how I linked it in my childhood memories.  I distinctly remembered sitting and listening to it one day in first grade.  The reason it stuck there against all evidence that I might have imagined the tune, is because that day I had come home from school after watching a film at an assembly.  That film was a dramatization about two little girls who get in a car with a stranger after the stranger gives them candy. 

It was an educational film meant to teach us the dangers of getting near strangers.  The girls are taken to an isolated spot and quickly dispatched.  One girl fleeing for her life manages to hide in a drain pipe, only to be found and murdered.  The film ended with actual raw footage of the two girls' bodies being taken away by the police, the girls I supposed upon which the story was based.

Again, this was the early 1970s.  This was when the scariest thing a kid like me was exposed to happened to be the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz.  I'm sure that today such a film would go in one eye and out the other for most kids.  But in the innocent days of early 70s grade school, it left a mark on me I never shook.  And because it was so depressing to watch, coming home and hearing this song always equated the Lord's Prayer - in my own mind at least - with a little sadness. 

Now I know it wasn't just some fanciful recreation in my mind.  It really did happen.  The song was really published, and in fact, apparently, was quite a hit.  And to this day I shy from getting into cars with strangers, adult that I am.  I was going to connect this all with taking a fresh look at the Lord's Prayer.  But at least for me, it showed me that some of these old memories may have more basis in reality than I thought.