Alabama community mourns passing of UA alumnus who arranged ‘Yea Alabama’
By SDS Staff
Published:
Alabama recently lost an important member of the Crimson Tide community. Steve Sample Sr., who arranged the UA fight song “Yea Alabama,” passed last weekend.
Sample enrolled at Alabama in 1955 and, after earning his bachelor’s degree, joined the school’s music staff in 1958, the same year Bear Bryant came back to coach the Crimson Tide.
Per the Tuscaloosa News story on Sample’s passing, he was asked by Col. Carleton K. Butler, longtime director of UA’s Million Dollar Band to write a “fresh” marching arrangement of the 1925 composition. Chris Gordon, a trumpeter who studied with Sample at the University of Alabama School of Music, told the Tuscaloosa News that Dample’s arrangement of “Yea Alabama” is “as instantly recognizable as “My Girl.”
“He had a fabulous sense of harmony, how it moved, how you could create substitute harmony from a historic perspective, because he was also a theory teacher,” Gordon told the News. “He was also a great orchestrator: He knew how to set those chords in voicings to get the maximum sound capacity out of it. And he had a wonderful melodic sense that also comes from that theory background.
“Put them together, they make a sound that only he has.”
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