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Did Michigan "steal" Their Fight Song?

+7 HS
CarolinaBuck's picture
November 19, 2017 at 3:47pm
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We're all familiar with Michigan's impressive fight song "The Victors," but few Buckeye fans know it's history.

1898, Louis Eibel, a Michigan student was returning to Ann Arbor on a train from Chicago after the Wolverines defeated the Chicago Maroons for the Western Conference Championship. Eibel lamented Michigan didn't have an appropriate fight song to celebrate victories and rally students and fans around the team. So he took pen to paper and wrote what John Phillip Souza called the "greatest college fight song in America." But did Eibel borrow the melody from another marching band tune from the times called "The Spirit of Liberty" and call it his own? The two songs seem to be amazingly similar, but what do I know? I'll let you be the judge and see if the thievery claim has merit after all these years.

 

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