Ay Ay Mama

From the artist:

I wrote this about 20 years ago for an Indigenous Peoples Day celebration in San Jose, California. This song is called Ay Ay Mama and is dedicated to the pacha mama (Mother Earth).

The initial melodies have been in my head for many years, even back to my teenage years. I remember I was sharing this melody as an instrumental song with my father, around 1976. He thought it would be nice not only as an instrumental piece, but with lyrics. And he actually suggested the first two lines. (My father, Jorge Ulloa Villabeitia 1914-2009, was a poet and writer). ‘Altivas montañas, soberbias y bellas’.

Later in life, I finished the song and released it as an instrumental piece. I actually didn’t put lyrics to it until later. But I never forgot the original lyrics my father suggested when he heard the melody. And I did use some of my father’s first line for the Spanish lyrics.

In this song, we ask the Pacha Mama for forgiveness for mistreating her, and we pledge to committing ourselves to heal her and help her to return to her original splendor. We thank the Pacha Mama for our lives, our sustenance, and our planet, and humbly commit ourselves to seeking justice for her.

This song has even greater importance now than when I originally wrote the lyrics. I wasn’t even really thinking about environmental damage. I was thinking about the damage caused by the European colonizers to my native mountains and lands of Peru and dispossessing the people of their ancestral lands.

To the native people, the mountains and the land are alive, they are living beings, they are sacred. Our native teachings say that you have to ask the mountains and the land for permission to use their gifts, you cannot just take and take. So now, around 40 years after I originally wrote this, the entire world is in peril. Fires, floods, destruction….I feel like this message is more urgent now than ever.

My hope is that this song will inspire people to be more mindful, more aware that we humans are just one element within nature. We are not the owner of this Earth, we belong to the Earth. We must respect, nurture, and care for the Earth in a relationship of mutuality. We are not owners but relatives and when we hurt the Earth, we hurt ourselves .