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Posted 11-22-99
Ross Duffin, Faynette H. Kulas Professor of Music at Case Western Reserve University, was chanting "Go to hell Art Modell" to himself when the words began to flow for a fight song to cheer on the new Cleveland Browns this fall.
Duffin, bard of fight songs for Cleveland's professional sports teams, penned "The Browns they are from Cleveland (A Song of Civil Indignation)" to the music of Thomas Phillips' 18th century glee, "Crows in the cornfield," which Duffin describes as a "Peter Rabbit-like story about the dangers of pilfering."
His lyrics tell the conniving tale of Art Modell, the former owner of the Cleveland Browns who moved the team to Baltimore, and the city's fight to keep the Browns in Cleveland.
"The words look much angrier than they sound in the context of the music," says the song master.
By the time he had finished scripting his new song, Robert Conrad, the manager of Cleveland's classical music station WCLV, began to think similar thoughts about how the Cleveland Browns could use a song to bolster them in the first season after the team's reorganization.
Duffin says he presented Conrad with the glee, an unaccompanied piece for three men's voices.
Joining Duffin in singing the song for airing on WCLV were Quentin Quereau, the chair of CWRU's Department of Music who was coaxed out of his retirement as a professional tenor, and Michael McMurray from the Baroque orchestra Apollo's Fire as the glee's "basso profundo."
The engineer for the recording was Bruce Egre, an audio engineer with the Cleveland Orchestra and the Cleveland Museum of Art, who mentors CWRU undergraduates in the Department of Music's audio engineering program.
When major sports events happen in Cleveland, Duffin, an early music scholar, is ready to mark the occasion with witty lyrics. His 1995 tribute to the Cleveland Indians helped take Cleveland's boys of summer to the World Series on the words of "Come all ye baseball fans" to music by Henry Purcell. Handel's "Acis and Galatea" was the inspiration for "Happy, Happy! We Love Our Cleveland Browns" as the gridiron warriors headed into the AFC championship in 1987.
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