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:
