“Rough! Tough! Real Stuff!”: Music, Militarism, and Masculinity in American College Football

Hullabaloo, Caneck! Caneck!Hullabaloo, Caneck! Caneck!Good-bye to Texas University,So long to the orange and the whiteGood luck to the dear old Texas AggiesThey are the boys that show the real old fight“The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You,”That is the song they sing so well,—So Good-bye to Texas University,We’re going to beat you all to ——.Chig-gar-roo-gar-rem!Chig-gar-roo-gar-rem!Rough! Tough! Real Stuff! Texas A&M.

—James Vernon Wilson’s lyrics to “The Aggie War Hymn” (1918)

In 1918 a Texas A&M University (A&M) student named James Vernon Wilson was stationed in Germany as part of the United States’ operations during the First World War. While on guard duty along the Rhine River, he penned a set of lyrics centered on the rivalry between his alma mater and the Longhorns of the University of Texas at Austin (UT).¹ Following the war, Wilson returned to campus with the lyrics in tow and performed the song several times with a quartet of A&M students. During this time, Wilson’s song was known by a few different names, including “The Battle Hymn of A. & M.” and “Good-Bye to Texas University.” The latter was the title of the song’s initial copyright in 1921, along with the subtitle “The Aggie War Hymn,” which would eventually become the name most associated with the tune.²

Wilson’s original verse contains a total of thirteen lines. Of these, five either directly reference UT or describe the school by association. In these lines, Wilson rejects both the colors associated with the rival institution and its fight song, “The Eyes of Texas.”³ Customarily, when A&M supporters—referred to as “Aggies” in the song—sing the line that shares its text with UT’s fight song, the audience members shout “sounds like hell” before continuing on to the next line, contributing an additional insult to the phrase “The Eyes of Texas.”⁴ Four of “The War Hymn’s” lines extol A&M, but only by comparison to the Longhorns. The first instance of this occurs as Wilson wishes the Aggies “good luck” before stating that they “are the boys that show the real old fight.” Because of this phrase’s position in between two explicit references to the Longhorns, one understands that the Aggies “show the real old fight” in contrast to the players from UT. This message is reiterated in the song’s final line, “Rough! Tough! Real Stuff!” Wilson’s use of the word “real” in both lines signifies the Aggies as being bona fide, possessing the moral and athletic aptitude that constitutes the masculine values the song espouses while maintaining that the Longhorns lack such characteristics. Furthermore, the song’s only first-person-plural pronoun occurs toward the end of the verse, with “we’re” shifting the song’s perspective from that of an outsider commenting on a heated rivalry to that of an Aggie full of institutional bias. This transformation culminates with the line, “We’re going to beat you all to [hell].”⁵ The lyrics’ other four lines consist of nonsense syllables taken from two already extant Aggie “yells” (phrases chanted in unison by a crowd, effectively identical to cheers), “Hullabaloo, Caneck! Caneck!” and “Chig-gar-roo-gar-rem!” These chants, alongside many others, originated at A&M in the early twentieth century as a practice in the school’s Corps of Cadets, a student military organization. At football games, cadet leaders guided students through yells in the stands. They also led these cheers during the pregame period and at halftime, when the entire corps formed a mass block “T” formation on the field. John A. Adams describes the practice as initially being a form of “crowd control” that eventually became “a major force to direct the ‘old pep’ of the students.”⁶

While most college football programs are not as clearly connected to militarism as the Aggies, martial associations are central components to college football culture. Discourses associated with war...