Song of the Day 1/29: Philadelphia Eagles Pep Band, “The Eagles’ Victory Song (Fly, Eagles, Fly)”
I’ve always had a problem with the lyrics to this song. Flying eagles are not on a road, to victory or anywhere else. They’re flying, they don’t need a road. That’s the whole point of flying.
To be fair, when it was written in 1964 at the behest of owner Jerry Wolman, those weren’t the lyrics. “Fight, Eagles, fight,” did double duty, leading off both the first and second lines. Wolman wanted a fight song to match the famous “Hail to the Redskins,” the team he grew up rooting for, and put together a brass band to play it at games, but it didn’t catch on and died out by the ’70s.
The song lay dormant until 1997, when the leader of what became the official Eagles Pep Band discovered it — and changed the lyrics. “It just sounded cool,” said Bobby Mansure, “instead of repeating the same thing, ‘Fight, Eagles Fight.’”
Of course, with the team on the doorstep of the Super Bowl, everybody wants to get into the act. The Philadelphia Orchestra:
Opera Philadelphia:
The same thing happened last time the team went deep into the playoffs. The Miller Brothers and Pretzel City Cheer Band in Reading translated it into Pennsylvnia Dutch.
And Chris Martin of Coldplay translated it into BritPop:
R.I.P. Tom Verlaine
GO BIRDS!
Coldplay? They’re like watching a loaf of white bread. Try this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1jyqwCbBzY
Yeah, that Cold Play was rough. No version can be sung more poorly than the Jalen Hurts version.
Speaking of which, what the F was Terry Bradshaw up to after that game? Holy guacamole!
In my best Dr. McCoy voice: “He’s a quarterback, Jason, not Beyonce!”
First of all, that’s an insult to white bread. And I didn’t include it because it was good but to illustrate how far from its core fandom the song has penetrated.
Re: the Coldplay version – As Samuel Johnson said when he heard of a woman preaching a sermon, “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on its hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”
Whoa! Samuel Johnson laying the sickest of sick burns on women, dogs, and Cold Play all at once!!
I was taught somewhere that to complete a rhyme a terminal “y” could be pronounced both “eee” and “eye” and so I’ve always figured that the lyricist of the Eagles’ fight song meant it to be sung “Fly Eagles fly, on the road to victor-eye.”
Does the Eagles Pep Band remind anyone else of the Banjo Dusters?
I just fell I love withe Pennsylvania Dutch version.