What is the JMU Fight Song?
Madison, James Madison, We are the Dukes of JMU!
Madison, James Madison, the fighting Dukes of JMU!
Fight for glory, honors won, brighten the lights of Madison!
Madison, James Madison, show you colors proud a true, WE ARE THE DUKES OF JMU!
The JMU Fight song was created by George West in the 1970s. He was the leading Jazz Professor at JMU, who was the pioneer for Jazz at JMU. George West passed away in 2013, at the age of 81. He revised the fight song to what it is today in the 1980s for Marching Royal Dukes Director Pat Rooney. And after nearly 40 years, the JMU fans still do not know the fight song!
How do people (students) not know the fight song?
Now, I admit to exaggerating that no one knows the fight song. But not enough people know the fight song to make our fan atmosphere a hyped environment at any of our sporting events, especially football. The group that should have no excuse with the fight song are the students, who have every opportunity to attend sporting events with ease. The main reasons JMU fans likely do not know the fight song are because they either do not know the words to the song, they do not care enough to pay attention, or they are piss drunk. Now if any parents are reading this, thinking “oh my underage student would never drink”, that is very naïve to think. But I digress. There have been efforts by JMU to educate students on the song, for example, the JMU T-shirt with the lyrics to the fight song printed upside-down. The reason this was not effective was because it was not easy to read and it was not an audio medium, which would have been more effective.
How do we fix the problem?
There are schools and teams in the U.S. whose fans do a good job at singing their fight song, for example the Philadelphia Eagles. The Eagles fight song, “Fly Eagles Fly”, was created and refined between 1950 and 1960. The JMU fight song has had just as much time to gain traction with fans to be sung effectively at games. But it is still not sung as loud as the Eagles fans. How did they do it?
The first thing JMU can do is to improve the use of our jumbotrons. In the video above, you can notice the Eagles show the lyrics to their fight song on their jumbotrons. JMU does the same thing, but at JMU football games you will notice the lyrics are tiny and are not as eye-popping as the Eagles’s graphics. This is one solution the JMU Sports Marketing team can use: making a video of eye-popping lyrics of the JMU fight song for the Bridgeforth stadium jumbotron. This would make it easier for fans to follow along. But to be affective, it needs to be played after every touchdown, which leads to my next point.
The second thing JMU Athletics can do is to improve their post touch down celebration. The problem that keeps people from sing the fight song at games is there is too much happening after JMU scores a touchdown. Currently, the things included in the celebration are the JMU ROTC canon fire, people throwing streamers, the announcer announcing the touch down, and the Marching Royal Dukes (MRD) play the fight song. This all happens in a matter of about 1 minute, while the team kicks their field goal. After that, the crowd is dead, all out of energy. We need to fix our fight song problem by spacing all these things out in our celebration. For the sake of the fight song, it would be best if the fight song was played after the Dukes kick their field goal because everyone is done throwing streams and there is about a 5-minute window between our football team kicking the field and the kick-off; mainly due to the ESPN+ commercial breaks. We should fill this silence with our fight song.
The next thing that needs to be address is the band. I’m sorry Marching Royal Dukes. I love you, but you all are part of the problem. The thing I notice that you all do is you play a different version of the fight song at the beginning of the game verses during the game. As a person who sings the fight song in their sleep, it confuses me just like any other fan! For those who are unaware, the band plays a version of the song in which they play a slower measure for the song when the crowd sings “We are the dukes of JMU!” But when the song is played for touch downs, the measure is faster. This is a problem because the fans singing clash with the band playing the fight song, which results in fans quitting at singing the fight song. All I’m saying is if we want more people to sing the fight song at games, the Marching Royal Dukes need to be more consistent with how they play the fight song. Another thing that the band can do, that is not done already, is playing the song with the full band, then play it with only the snare drum so that the fans can be head singing the song. This should be done through the whole game.
The last thing that can be done is playing audio of the song lyrics over the stadium sound system. It is hard to notice in the Eagles video, but the Eagles play an audio for the lyrics of their fight song over their sound system. Being a diehard Eagles fan and being to several Eagles games in my life, you can hear the audio in the stadium. Now, I understand it won’t be the most honorable thing to be known has a team who pumps verbal audio into their stadium. But the purpose of it would be to help the fans get started singing the fight song. Once enough people are singing the fight song, you cannot hear the audio, like in the video of the Eagles fight song. Another place the audio can be played is on Instagram stories for JMU Football and JMU Sports. This would be effective because many students use Instagram as a platform to check the results of games and see other content for JMU Sports.
Before I say my thank you's, I want to acknowledge the JMU students… AS THE WORST FANS IN THE SBC and even in college sports. Allow me to give you a list of things that make us the worst of sports fans.
We do not show up on time to games.
We leave at half-time, win or lose.
We throw streamers when we are not supposed to. (They are only meant for touch downs! Not for field goals, not for first downs, and especially not for throwing into the band’s tubas.)
We show up drunk to games.
We do not know any other chants, except for “I believe!” and “You can't do that!”
We cannot coordinate for black-out or purple-out games to save our lives.
We do not make signs for either trashing the other teams or supporting our own team.
We would rather take pictures for the Gram (Instagram) at Bridgeforth Stadium than watch the game.
We only get hyped when the camera man puts us on the jumbotron.
We do not know our fight song.
If there is anything else that I forgot to put on the list, please let me know by leaving a comment below! If you have a problem with the list #TheTruth, you know who I am, the Sign-guy.
My hope is that the JMU Sports Marketing team, the Marching Royal Dukes, and the JMU fans consider my recommendations for improving our fan atmosphere, to make Harrisonburg the most HYPE town in college sports. “Now” is always a good starting point. So, please share this around for the JMU community to learn their fight song and keep the legacy of George West forever lasting. Go Dukes!
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