The History of the Iowa Fight Song

The history behind the University of Iowa's iconic fight song is certainly unique. The nearly 63-year-old tune is one of only a few fight songs to be written by a famous songwriter. In this case, Iowa's own Meredith Willson.

Dr. Eric Bush: Meredith Willson was born in 1902 and his upbringing is well-documented in Iowa. He moved to New York and went to the Institute of Musical Art, which would later be called the Juilliard School. And it was during that time that he actually had a three year stint with the John Philip Sousa Band.

♪♪

Dr. Eric Bush: He was a good flute player and a good piccolo player and has an amazing career and an appreciation for march music within the Sousa Band that sort of permeated his music for the rest of his life. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, there was a need at the University of Iowa for a new fight song.

♪♪

Dr. Eric Bush: There was a need for a fight song that was more on par with other peer institutions, certainly in the Big Ten Conference and across the United States.

♪♪

Dr. Eric Bush: There was a director of publicity at Iowa and he reached out to Meredith Willson being one of the big names musician wise from Iowa and said, would you be interested in writing the university a new fight song? So, he did and he wrote a tune called "The Iowa Fight Song" and it went through a number of revisions. There was an addition that came over from the band director at Iowa at the time, he had some edits to it and said, why don't you consider this, here are some ranges, here are some better ways to think of melody with wind instruments, here's some considerations with the key and also he said something along the lines of it needs to hit them right in the eyes.

♪♪

Dr. Eric Bush: So it starts with a big cymbal crash and the band chants, what's the word, fight, fight, fight and then it picks up -- and it has that sort of rouser quality that they were looking for in a fight song. Ladies and gentleman, the Hawkeye Marching Band! What's the word? Fight, fight, fight!

♪♪

Dr. Eric Bush: The Iowa Fight Song was debuted on a national radio show called "The Big Show" and Meredith Willson was doing a little bit of a stick or a standup and he was telling some jokes and he got into this thing about how the University of Iowa needed a new fight song to help the team, they weren't doing so hot at the time. This is the big week in football, the bowl games, you know. So I wrote a song for my home state university, Iowa. See, Iowa was just nosed out in a game with Ohio State, 83 to 21.

(laughter)

Dr. Eric Bush: And he talked about the Iowa Fight Song and what it meant and how it was a sort of a gift to the University of Iowa and he wrote it up and they actually premiered it and it was a great band that played it and it's a version that is a little bit different than anything that we sort of have nowadays.

♪♪

Dr. Eric Bush: It was an instant classic. It was really well received and it was just instantly known as one of the great fight songs.

♪♪

Dr. Eric Bush: It's just really interesting to see how he envisioned that tune and then of course you fast forward 70 years later and how we're still playing a version of that for our pregame sequence.

♪♪

Dr. Eric Bush: Meredith Willson always had a deep connection to the state of Iowa. He was an Iowa boy through and through. ♪♪ Dr. Eric Bush: It's well-documented that he came back to Iowa often and he was often a guest of the Hawkeye Marching Band. There's plenty of video and photography of him on the ladder conducting the HMB and he was of course a big favorite.

♪♪

Dr. Eric Bush: I think he brought march music into the mainstream because of his popularity in America and his voice in a number of different genres. He wrote symphonies, he wrote film music, of course he wrote a great American fight song. All of those things sort of made him popular for a lot of different reasons. And when those early experiences with march music permeated his later music it really brought it to the stage and brought it to the American forefront. People started to listen to this music and appreciate it at a higher level.

♪♪