One of the first families to help steer the Bengals into existence more than a half-century ago still gathers to celebrate birthdays, holidays and other special occasions the same way most of the team’s fans revel in success, by singing “The Bengal Growl.”
George “Red” Bird penned the campy fight song in the summer of 1968 at the behest of team founder Paul Brown, his former next-door neighbor when both men worked at Massillon High School. Brown hired Bird as the team’s director of entertainment, with one of his first tasks being the creation of the fight song.
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And for the past 53 years, not only has “The Bengal Growl” been sung after touchdowns at every home game, but there also are raucous renditions at local watering holes, Bengals backer bars across the country and, more than anywhere else, in homes where families gather on Sundays to watch the game.
Hear that Bengal Growlin’
Mean and angry,
Hear he comes a prowlin’,
Lean and hungry.
Debby McIntyre was the first person to ever sing those opening lyrics. The oldest of Bird’s three grandchildren, McIntyre remembers sitting in the family room of her grandparents’ Forest Park home as a 13-year-old in the summer of 1968, her focus on the television interrupted by Bird plinking out a melody on the piano.
“He didn’t use any sort of tape recorder, he would just play for a little bit, then stop and write down notes and lyrics on paper, then play a little more,” says McIntyre, who still has the original manuscript her grandfather composed that afternoon. “I sang in choirs, so he had me sing it with him to see how it sounded. And I’ve been singing it ever since.”
An offensive brute,
Run, pass or boot,
And defensively,
He’s rough … tough.
The song still succeeds in its original mission of celebrating touchdowns as it delays bathroom breaks and beer runs for most of the 65,000 people packed into Paul Brown Stadium eager to hear it blare.
As soon a Bengals player crosses the goal line, people roar and slap high fives with strangers and for years, Todd Rundgren’s “Bang the Drum All Day” played immediately. But fans’ focus turns to what’s next. They look to the video board as they wait for the cue to begin singing, dancing and acting out the lyrics they either know by heart or will by the end of the game.
Cincinnati Bengals,
That’s the team we’re going to cheer to victory,
Touchdown Bengals,
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Get some points up on the board and win a game for Cincinnati.
It’s not just a celebration. It’s a connection. To the team and, more importantly, to family. Ask a fan who attended their first Bengals game as a kid what they remember most, and the answer won’t be stats or play calls. Even the final score sometimes drifts into the ether. But seeing the joy on your dad’s face while you sing the song together and throw your hands in the air when the line “Touchdown Bengals” hits, that memory never fades.
Nor does the song itself, despite an era of change that is sweeping through the franchise, coinciding with the hiring of Elizabeth Blackburn as the team’s director of strategy and engagement in 2020.
The great-granddaughter of team founder Paul Brown and granddaughter of current Bengals owner Mike Brown, Blackburn has taken over as the front-facing member of the family-owned franchise, blowing through the front office and shattering the status quo.
“I have a granddaughter, who, unlike my children, is not afraid of me,” Mike Brown mused recently about Elizabeth’s eagerness to buck some decades-old traditions in favor of fresh ideas and initiatives, many of which she has successfully implemented.
In a short time in her lofty role, Blackburn has led the charge for new uniforms, new branding and, most notably, the creation of a Ring of Honor, which Mike had pushed back against even though fans have been screaming for it since before Elizabeth was born.
And she has promised more is on the way, with much of the change focusing on what fans will see — and hear — on game days.
A match made in Massillon
George Bird was to marching bands what Paul Brown was to football — innovative, meticulous, demanding and incredibly successful. And for three years, the pair of brilliant minds shared the Massillon Washington High School football field on Friday nights.
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Brown had led the Tigers to back-to-back AP national championships in 1935 and 1936 as well as the first three of six consecutive Ohio state championships by the time the school hired Bird as its band director in 1938.
At that point, many high school bands wore black, military-style uniforms and simply played the national anthem and school fight song. Bird, a professional big-band musician with a background in vaudeville and burlesque, made the switch to uniforms splashed with color and taught his charges the popular songs of the day dominating radio airplay. Bird introduced measured steps with the yard lines serving as markers and added dance moves, baton twirlers, spotlights and a mascot whose costume was made from real tiger skin.
Each performance had its own theme, and it wasn’t long before the Massillon Tiger Swing Band earned the nickname “The Greatest Show in High School Football” and was featured in a spread in Life magazine.
“He was known as the father of the American marching band,” says Buck Allan, Bird’s grandson. “He invented all of that stuff. It was more than just the band marching; they were whole shows with costumes and props.”
The Massillon Washington football team plays in Paul Brown Stadium. The Massillon Tiger Swing Band lists its mailing address as One George “Red” Bird Drive.
Brown left Massillon in 1941 to coach the Ohio State Buckeyes. He became the coach of the upstart Cleveland Browns in 1945 and earned an ownership stake. When it came time to hire a music and entertainment director, Brown needed to make only one call.
Bird wrote the Browns fight song, “Hi! O Hi! O for Cleveland” prior to the team’s first season in 1946, and it’s still played at games today.
The union dissolved in jarring fashion in 1963 when Browns owner Art Modell stunned the NFL and fired Paul Brown. Bird stayed on in his role with the team, but only until he received another call from Brown four years later, offering him to become the entertainment director of the new team Brown had founded, the expansion Cincinnati Bengals.
Paul Brown wanted a team fight song when he started the Bengals in Cincinnati in 1968. (Focus on Sport / Getty Images)Bird, who was 67 at the time, jumped at the chance to return to Cincinnati, where he had attended the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, and where his wife, Marie, had been a professional singer and radio show host on WLW-AM with Eddie Albert, of “Green Acres” fame.
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Bird’s first assignment was to write a fight song for the new team, and the melody and lyrics he crafted while Debby listened on that summer day in 1968 are still triggering joyous singing and dancing 53 years later.
“It makes me so proud to know that song is still a part of the team,” Debby says. “It’s like our family is still a part of the Bengals in some small way.”
Bird didn’t just write “The Bengal Growl,” he and his Bird’s Bengals Band, a group of eight to 12 musicians, played it multiple times every home game from their bandstand stationed in the back corner of the end zone, first at Nippert Stadium and later at Riverfront.
Prior to writing “The Bengal Growl,” Bird knew he wanted to include an actual tiger snarl in the song. So he carried an old reel-to-reel recorder to the Cincinnati Zoo and pointed a microphone at the tiger exhibit. The sound quality never was good enough for the meticulous Bird, so he instead invented a device to replicate the sound.
“He experimented with different devices for about a year,” Buck recalls. “What he ended up with was little cans on fiberboard, and he’d attach a cord to the end of it and take a piece of cloth with rosin on it, and when you pulled down that cloth, it would make a sound like a tiger snarling.”
For the first two decades of the Bengals, the Bird family was a huge part of the franchise.
Bird and his daughter Shirley, a school music teacher and his assistant before succeeding him upon his death in 1979, also were in charge of scheduling a national anthem singer and the marching bands which would provide the pre-game and halftime entertainment. And they took all of it seriously.
“They scouted acts the way teams scout players,” Debby says. “And they were very picky about how ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ was sung. The person couldn’t put any personal touches on it, and it had to be finished down to the second because if the game started late, the team got fined.”
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Shirley helped form the first Ben-Gals cheerleading squad and designed the outfits, and her daughter Chris, the youngest sibling to Debby and Buck, spent a few seasons as a Ben-Gal.
Buck held various roles, the wildest of which was a one-time gig for the most famous home game in team history. Buck was scheduled to work the 1981 AFC Championship Game as a photographer, but when the man who dressed in the mascot costume had car trouble due to the weather, Shirley asked Buck if he would want to fill in.
“I was the warmest person in the stadium that day,” he says. “A lot of the other photographers got frostbite on their face from holding the cameras against their skin.”
From the frigid bandbox named for the late Bird, the musicians played “The Bengal Growl” after three touchdowns that day as the Bengals beat the San Diego Chargers 27-7 to advance to their first Super Bowl.
Song stands test of time
The Bengals haven’t won a playoff game since the team did away with Bird’s bandbox.
The team’s last playoff victory was on Jan. 6, 1991. The band’s final performance was on Dec. 22, 1991, a little more than five months after Paul Brown died and his son, Mike, took control of the franchise.
One of the early changes Mike Brown made was to move away from live music in favor of playing more modern, popular music through the speakers spread throughout the seating bowl. “It’s just that times changed,” Brown said recently when reflecting on the decision. “I personally liked the old band. I wish it were still here and George was directing it.”
The entire game-day experience looks and feels different today than it did nearly 30 years ago, but one thing Brown never changed was “The Bengal Growl.” And the reason had nothing to do with consumer surveys or anticipated backlash. It was far simpler than that.
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“I like it,” Brown says of the song. “I think it’s different. A lot of people like to say it’s too campy, but I think it’s distinctive. I think it generates a good feeling. It’s played when we score, so that’s part of the reason probably. But I’m glad we have it and it’s part of our tradition. To me, it’s a big part of the legacy of our team.”
The older the song gets, the stronger the legacy grows.
Every Sunday in the fall when the Bengals are home, there are people, many of them youngsters, attending their first game and likely hearing the song for the first time. Radio stations don’t play it, even when the team is winning. And you’re surely not going to find it on Pandora or Spotify.
The song did find one new home this summer. At training camp, a band of young musicians, The Bengals Boys, serenaded fans arriving for the only full weekend of practices open to the public.
On the band’s Facebook page, they joke “The Bengal Growl” is the only song they know as they have recorded videos of them performing the song in multiple stylings, from country to punk to smooth jazz and everything between.
None of the band members were even close to being alive the last time the Bengals made the Super Bowl in 1988. But the Bengal Boys, with the allegiance to the team and the song, have archived a way for fans to thumb up their favorite version of it if the team decides to move away from the touchdown tradition.
Passed from one generation to the next
Blackburn literally moved away from the song several years ago.
Or so she thought.
After graduating from Dartmouth in 2015, the Cincinnati native was working for the Bain & Company consulting firm in San Francisco as her 6-0 Bengals were heading to Pittsburgh to play their hated division rivals. Blackburn went to the Bengals fan bar directory on the team website and found out San Francisco had one called the Bus Stop.
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When A.J. Green caught a go-ahead touchdown from Andy Dalton in the fourth quarter, she was thrilled to be surrounded by celebrating fellow fans. But she was floored by what came next.
“Everyone broke out into the song,” she says. “It was quite the production. It was amazing.”
Even with scores of fans in Bengals jerseys enjoying a Skyline chili buffet and pulling for a common goal, it still felt as though she was watching her team from 2,300 miles away. But when the singing started, it felt like home.
“The Bengal Growl” came long before the Bengals’ signature “Who Dey” chant, but both remain big parts of the fan experience at home games. (Andy Lyons / Getty Images)That’s what the song does, it evokes emotion and stirs memories, whether you attend games with your parents, kids, siblings, strangers or the owner of the team.
Or even with your teammates.
“Whenever I hear it, it takes me back to my playing days and I start humming,” Bengals legend and Pro Football Hall of Famer Anthony Muñoz says.
“It’s stood the test of time,” adds Ken Anderson, the greatest quarterback in franchise history. “So I think there’s really something to the song. It’s still neat to watch the crowd’s reaction when they play it all these years later. It’s part of the Cincinnati culture. It’s part of all of us.”
No one may be more qualified to speak about the legacy of the song, as well as its structure and composition, than Andy Biersack, a Cincinnati native and the lead singer of the rock band Black Veil Brides.
With a degree from Cincinnati’s School for Creative and Performing Arts, Biersack has been studying music for most of his life. And he’s been singing “The Bengal Growl” for even longer, learning it early in life from his father and grandfather, each of whom was a season ticket holder.
“It was instilled in me from the time I was a very little kid that it was a very important and big part of our lives,” Biersack says. “The Bengals were so bad for so long, and the little things like the family element and that song were what kept it all being very fun and more than just an experience of watching the team you love lose for your entire life.”
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Biersack still flies home for a couple of games each season. And for years he insisted his tour manager block out the day of the Super Bowl, just to be sure he wouldn’t have to do a show while the Bengals were playing for a championship.
Like most fans in the stadium, he belts out of the song after every touchdown. But he’s known the words for decades, so instead of watching the scoreboard, he looks around for the youngsters in the crowd.
“You can tell which kids are at their first game,” he says with a laugh. “Because when the song comes on, they’ve got this look on their face like, ‘What in the fuck is this?'”
But by the end of the game, they’re reading the words on the scoreboard and singing along with everyone else.
Just getting the kids to sing what they read isn’t enough for some longtime fans. The group that goes to the games with Sarah Taylor the past few years has made sure memorization was involved.
Taylor, the wife of Bengals coach Zac Taylor, is a Wisconsin native who had never heard the song before her husband got the job in 2019. So it was her best friend, Wendy Kiler, who took on the role of teacher for the Taylors’ two young sons, Brooks and Luke.
Kiler is a lifelong fan whose first memories of the song are singing it in the church basement while playing with her dolls during a party to watch Super Bowl XXIII. She’s now tasked herself with teaching the next generation.
“That first year, every time we’d score, she would run down to the front of the suite and look the boys in the eye and say, ‘OK, boys, we’ve got this, (we) just must learn and sing this song,'” Taylor says. “I’m getting chills and tearing up just thinking about it again.”
‘That song is here to stay’
Like McIntyre on that summer day in 1968, Blackburn’s first memories of singing “The Bengal Growl” were not in a stadium of thousands, but rather with an audience of one, early in the formative years in the warmth of her grandparents’ home.
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“I have this vivid memory of singing it in Goggy’s kitchen,” Blackburn says, referring to her grandmother Nancy Brown, Mike’s wife. “She literally taught me ‘The Bengal Growl’ song and the Who Dey chant as I was learning how to spell my name. I’ve known and sung this song basically since I could speak.”
Touchdowns are time machines in Cincinnati.
The scoring plays have been rarer recently, and even when they do happen, many times they’re insignificant to the outcome of a game already decided. But regardless of the scoreboard or the clock or anything else associated with the game, fans love to hear and sing “The Bengal Growl.” It’s tradition, like egg hunts on Easter, grandma’s pie on Thanksgiving and presents on Christmas morning.
Or texts on Sunday afternoons in the fall.
Biersack’s busy schedule keeps him from going to as many games as he used to when his family had season tickets in the 1990s and early 2000s. But he can be on any stage in any country in the world, and if the Bengals score a touchdown, there is an instant connection to his parents through the song.
A long time ago his dad bought an animatronic football figure on a TV shopping network, and it played “The Bengal Growl.” When the family gathered at road games in Biersack’s youth, his dad would fire it up every time the Bengals scored, and they all would sing along.
“Eventually, it stopped working, but he’ll text me a picture of it every time they score,” Biersack says. “And the new thing is my mom, no matter where I am in the world, will text me the YouTube video of the song every time we score.”
If the Bengals were to do away with the song, no doubt many fans will be running to YouTube and hitting share with every touchdown. Hearing, and singing, the song after each score is like the cutting of the cake at your wedding reception — a ritual that is as mandatory as it is celebratory.
Elizabeth Blackburn, Mike Brown and Zac Taylor chat at Paul Brown Stadium. Blackburn and Brown plan to keep “The Bengal Growl” as a mainstay at the team’s home games. (Courtesy of the Cincinnati Bengals)And that’s why, in a recent editorial on the team site detailing all the changes she’s ushering in, Blackburn made a point to specifically mention “The Bengal Growl” and that it’s not going anywhere.
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“Seeing fans sing it at games is the most telling thing,” Blackburn says. “Whenever you’re trying to evaluate consumer behavior, finding things that people actually do and not just say they do or say they like is always the most powerful, important piece of information you have.
“I specifically mentioned it because I think ‘The Bengal Growl’ is one of the strongest traditions we have, and I wanted to give fans some peace of mind that while we are adding fun new things, that song is here to stay.”
Yes, the decision to keep the song is a nod to the fans she’s paid to engage with. But it’s also personal. From the memory of her grandmother teaching her the song as a little girl to that chill-bumps moment in San Francisco to each of the touchdowns the Bengals scored at Paul Brown Stadium last season, “The Bengal Growl” is a part of her.
A part — both old and brand new — of her entire family.
“There is this guy who sits in front of us in the club section who has created his own motions to act out the song,” Blackburn says. “I don’t know him. He doesn’t know us. But all of us have started following his hand motions, and that just became our own little tradition.”
(Top photo: Nick Cammett / Diamond Images / Getty Images)
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