10/9/00
NOTED COMPOSER WAS PROUD OF HIS 'WAR EAGLE' FIGHT SONG
AUBURN -- In his later years, Robert Allen would occasionally walk over to a shelf in his living room and listen to the melody that spilled from an old music box. The music box was in the shape of a football and so old that part of the ear of a tiny Tiger on the front of it had broken off.
The music it played was "War Eagle," Auburn University's fight song.
"He was very proud of that song," said Patty Allen, the widow of the famous composer who teamed with Al Stillman to compose "War Eagle" and such classics as Johnny Mathis' "Chances Are" and "Home for the Holidays," recorded by singers ranging from Andy Williams to Garth Brooks.
"He would watch the Auburn games on television just to hear it played and that music box that the people at Auburn sent to him meant so much to him," said Mrs. Allen.
Allen died of cancer on Oct. 1 at his home in Quogue, N.Y. He was 73. In addition to his wife, Allen is survived by four children, his mother, a sister and three grandchildren. The family requested that, in lieu of expressions of sympathy such as flowers, charitable contributions be made to the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Department of Surgery, 1275 York Ave., New York, N.Y., 10021.
In the 1950s Newsweek magazine called Allen America's "most popular songwriter." His compositions have sold more than 500 million recordings by such stars as Mathis, Brooks, Williams, The Four Lads, Perry Como, Tony Bennett, Billie Holiday, Doris Day and many others.
Allen began writing music in 1952. It was two years after that prominent Auburn alumnus Roy B. Sewell sought out what he considered the best of the big-city songwriters -- Allen and Stillman -- and commissioned them to write a song "to express the spirit which has sparked the Tigers' amazing football comeback."
Sewell, who called it "a peach of song," presented it as a gift to the Auburn Alumni Association.
Hubert Liverman, who was head of the Auburn music department from 1951-1967 and put together the first arrangement of "War Eagle" for the Auburn Marching Band, remembers 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 completed the arrangement for the band, the Auburn Marching Band, directed by Dave Herbert, played it for the first time at a football game when Auburn hosted Chattanooga 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."
For Robert Allen -- a man of such acclaim -- "War Eagle" would seem to be of little significance.
Not so, says Patty Allen.
"He really loved it and was proud of it right up until his death," she said. "I don't know if it was because it was so different from the other things he'd done, but he was very proud of having written that song.
"He was a very talented man. His songs were very different and he wrote for a phenomenal array of performers of different styles. He will be missed, but his music will be with us forever. It will always be alive."
And never more so than when the Auburn University Marching Band takes the field at Jordan-Hare Stadium and more than 85,000 adoring fans rise to clap in rhythm to Robert Allen's "War Eagle."
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