Boola Boola?.................
“...The SEC plays the best football but their fight songs are bland...”
“Rocky Top” is bland?????
The IOWA Corn Song ?
Is it still called a fight song?
Won’t the word, fight trigger the little snowflakes?
Well, Yale’s Bull Dog, even though it IS by Cole Porter, is no great shakes.
Bull Dog”, by Cole Porter
Vanity post forthcoming, shortly.
SUNG:
Fight fiercely, Harvard,
Fight, fight, fight!
Demonstrate to them our skill.
Albeit they possess the might,
Nonetheless we have the will.
How we will celebrate our victory,
We shall invite the whole team up for tea
(how jolly!)
Hurl that spheroid down the field, and
Fight, fight, fight!
Fight fiercely, Harvard,
Fight, fight, fight!
Impress them with our prowess, do!
Oh, fellows, do not let the crimson down,
Be of stout heart and true.
Come on, chaps, fight for Harvard’s glorious name,
Won’t it be peachy if we win the game?
(oh, goody!)
Let’s try not to injure them, but
Fight, fight, fight!
Lets not be rough though!
Fight, fight, fight!
And do fight fiercely
Fight, fight, fight!
Once liked the Notre Dame fight song but now every time I hear it, it reminds me of Obama. Ugh!
The fight songs have special meanings to the locals that outsiders won’t get.
For example, Bama’s fight song has the line: “remember the Rose Bowl we’re winning”. That might not mean much to folks outside Alabama and certainly folks outside the southeast. But that line is in reference to Bama winning the Rose Bowl in 1926 and bringing respect to the south using a sport popular at the time with ivy league schools. The south had been trying to get some respect ever since losing the Civil War. Then Bama went on to dominate the Rose Bowl for a decade, so much that the sports writers got tired of writing about the Rose Bowl committee’s team choices (it was billed as the best team in the east vs the best team in the west, thus a national championship game much like we talk about the playoff committee today). So the sportswriters created the AP poll as a way to name someone else besides Alabama the best, regardless of if the Rose Bowl committee kept picking Bama every other year and Bama kept winning it. And it was successful for a few decades, Bama wasn’t the AP national champ until Bear Bryant.
If you don’t know the backstory to the fight songs then you don’t know why they mean as much to the locals.
So us Bama fans think of that when we sing “Remember the Rose Bowl we’re winning”.
“Die You Gravy Sucking Pigs”
It was composed in 1939 by the bandleader Fred Waring in 1939 after a petition request from OU students and faculty.
Forgive the redundancy considering the vanity thread, but read the story and give it a listen here:
http://www.soonersports.com/ViewArticle.dbml?ATCLID=208806151
The Florida Gator tune “We Are the Boys from Old Florida” is badly miscast as a fight song. Of unknown composition, in the 1920s it became popular and somehow remains traditional at University of Florida football games. Sung as a waltz at the end of the third quarter, it lacks the rousing tempo of an effective fight song and is burdened with lyrics such as a claim Florida is “Where the girls are the fairest, The boys are the squarest.” Yeah, that’ll intimidate the opposition! The song belongs at ice cream socials instead of football games.
The ultimate generic college fight son is ‘Fight On for Old’:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atakACn42es
Minnesota, hats off to thee!
To thy colors true we shall ever be,
Firm and strong, united are we.
Rah, rah, rah, for Ski-U-Mah,
Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah!
Rah for the U of M.
[Repeat]
M-I-N-N-E-S-O-T-A!
Minnesota, Minnesota!
Yay, Gophers! RAH!
- Roll Tide -
The two songs USC plays incessantly during their games. They should be outlawed. “Men of Troy” and Conquest.” I mute the sound on the tv when UW and USC play. Would rather hear fingernails on a chalkboard!
The funniest is Tom Leher’s, “Fight Harvard” IMHO.