10/5/00
ROBERT ALLEN, 'WAR EAGLE' COMPOSER, DIES OF CANCER AT 73
AUBURN -- Robert Allen, composer of the Auburn University fight song "War Eagle," died of colon cancer on Sunday, Oct. 1, at his home in Quogue, N.Y., according to The New York Times. He was 73.
Allen, who also counted such classics as "Chances Are" and "Home for the Holidays" among his hundreds of compositions, wrote the music to the tune while his collaborator, Al Stillman, wrote the lyrics.
"War Eagle" was commissioned in 1954 by prominent Auburn alumnus Roy B. Sewell, who sought out what he considered the best of the big-city songwriters and charged them with writing a song "to express the spirit which has sparked the Tigers' amazing football comeback."
Sewell made the song -- "a peach of song," according to a pleased Sewell -- a gift to the Auburn Alumni Association.
Hubert Liverman, who served as head of the Auburn Department of Music from 1951-1967 and put together the first arrangement of "War Eagle" for the Auburn Marching Band, recalled when he first played the song.
"I was on a committee of some nature examining the song and I went to (then-Auburn President Ralph Brown Draughon's) office and he called several people in and I played it on the piano for them," said Liverman, now retired and living in Hendersonville, N.C. "They asked my opinion and I told them that it was very, very good -- extremely good -- and that we ought to use it."
After Liverman put together the arrangement, the marching band -- under the direction of Dave Herbert -- played it for the first time at a football game when Auburn defeated Chattanooga 15-6 on Sept. 24, 1955.
"It was a good song," recalled Herbert, who was director of bands at Auburn from 1948 through 1955. "It replaced 'Auburn Victory March' that we used to play a lot, but sort of faded out after 'War Eagle.' We recognized that 'War Eagle' was a good fight song for Auburn and we played it regularly after that."
Not everyone was enamored with the song, however.
"But imagine, if you can, in either supreme victory or utter defeat, Auburn's uncontainable spirit being vented in these driveling lines . . . ," said an editorial in The Montgomery Advertiser. "This insipid, anemic attempt to versify one of the supreme bellows of our time is just plain tragic. . . . It's for the Ladies' Aid Society, not Auburn."
"'War Eagle,'" countered The Lee County Bulletin, "is a fighting song expressing in music the undaunted spirit of today's revitalized Tigers."
Allen is survived by his wife, his mother, four children, a sister and three grandchildren.
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