The rest of the country learned how obnoxiously often their band plays the most repetitive fight song in college athletics. USA Today
Yes, it is obnoxious, and I have said for years, go one time to Texas/OU and you can't get that damn song out of your head for months. That said, the USA fishwrap writers should have been around for SMU pre death penalty, when that group of Spike Jones wannabes cranked out "she'll be coming around the mountain" every time the damn ball was snapped. In fact, it was their noise that kept our defense from hearing the whistle in Texas Stadium on the play where Robin Sendlien planted Eric Dickerson and got flagged for unsportsmanlike conduct. That play was great on multiple fronts: 1) Dickerson didn't want anymore of our defense and basically quit 2) Bill Began was referee, and that call helped the SWC get rid of him over the strong objections of Percy Penn. Those two ruled SWC officials and kept anyone from Houston out of the conference for several years.
I love marching bands. Here was the band leader's response Brian Britt January 3 at 1:25pm · Hey USA TODAY, thanks for the article regarding our relentless playing of Boomer Sooner in support of our football team. Yes, we play Boomer Sooner, we play it a lot, and we play it more than most of our other spirit tunes. However your assertion that "they basically only play one song" is a gross over generalization and incorrect. A simple google search for "The Pride of Oklahoma Marching Band" will take you to our YouTube channel where you can listen to many other tunes that we have played over the years. In fact our repertoire this season alone featured six different halftime shows including a couple dozen tunes or so. So please be more precise with your language because as you know many people think everything they read on the internet is inerrant truth. I get that this story is mostly snark, but come on man, in the height of the CFP playoff there are so many cool things that our band students (and virtually ALL college band students do) that add to the collegiate football atmosphere that would be a better story. Relentless playing of a given tune like we and others (notably USC and FSU) do, is only a small part of what we are about. I hope you'll consider doing a story about the Alabama and Georgia bands preparation for the CFP Championship for instance. Here's a better story for you: just two days ago, our students woke up at 4AM to march in the 5.5 mile Rose Parade, during which they engaged and inspired hundreds of thousands of people in the process. Spoiler alert: we played 2 other songs besides Boomer Sooner and we sang our state song and got others to joins us too! Following the parade, our students went to work supporting our team in the Rose Bowl (congratulations to the Georgia Bulldogs, by the way) for 4.5 hours and performed a pregame show (including 3 songs besides Boomer Sooner) and a halftime show (also including 3 songs besides Boomer Sooner). By the way, they absolutely KILLED IT. Then yesterday, (on 5 hours rest after a 14 hour day representing our university and supporting our team) our students performed a concert (including 4 songs besides Boomer Sooner) for a couple thousand people at Disneyland. THAT'S the story you could have told. It would have taken more effort to cover it, but this powerful and positive message about the Pride of Oklahoma students would surely have resonated with many people desperate for some good news about young people, no matter their opinion of our fight song. All of that said, you have a standing invitation to come to Norman anytime during football season to do a behind the scenes story about our band. We'll give you complete access to our rehearsals and you can embed with us for our 9-hour game day work day. I'm willing to bet that many of my collegiate band director colleagues would also welcome your presence on their campus as well. We've got a much better story to tell than "hey these guys sure play their fight song a lot." Just let me know what shirt size you wear and when to meet you at the airport. College band students are awesome human beings. There's so much more to them than performing the fight song. Let's work together to tell that story next season. And oh yeah, Boomer Sooner! Oklahoma's band mocked for overused fight song Game respect game? USATODAY.COM
5.5 miles and only played 2 total songs? Either those were Bob Dylan songs, they marched at spring speed, or else they played the songs over and over again in the same manner as they do with Boomer Sooner.
Yeah: It's a parade so they have different audiences each time they move a quarter mile. I was sitting with a bunch of Oklahoma fans ... they had heard the songs a million times, but seemed to enjoy hearing them again.
In parades, you'll typically play only two songs, three max. As you march past, spectators aren't even going to hear one full song. You could probably get away with playing only one song over and over, as much as that would annoy whoever's in front of you in the parade. Two songs is fairly typical, so it's easy to remember. "What did we play last? Oh yeah, the fight song. Do the other song this time." I'm pretty sure we did only one full-fledged parade the one year I was in LHB, and I think all we did was "Texas Fight" and "March Grandioso."
correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Boomer Sooner the only tune that the OU band plays in the stands during the game? (usually in response to a touchdown, PAT, field goal, first down, interception, fumble recovery, gain of more than 5 yards, bad call by the ref in favor of OU, etc.)
I'd forgotten that. Ten thousand midnight's ago. I was drained after that game. Now I haven't been to an SMU game since the night they dedicated their new stadium in 2000, in their game program the two pages dedicated to the band always included the very proud claim of having played their song something like 900 consecutive times at a game vs. TCU in the 1960's. And you wonder why they ran an outlaw program.
They play snippets of Boomer Sooner on all of the events mentioned, but it's not their only song. When other teams have the ball the play songs like Sweet Caroline, Oklahoma from the Musical and the pop tunes the band learns for it's half time performances.
