The U.S. Air Force

“The U.S. Air Force” is the official song of the United States Air Force, adopted in the late 1940s, and is often referred to as “Wild Blue Yonder”.
Title changes Originally, the song was titled “Army Air Corps.” Robert MacArthur Crawford wrote the initial first verse and the basic melody line in May 1939.[1] During World War II, the service was renamed “Army Air Forces” because of the change in the main U.S. Army’s air arm naming in mid-1941, and the song title changed to agree. In 1947, when the Air Force became a separate service, the song was retitled, “The U.S. Air Force.”As Apollo 15 Lunar Module Falcon lifts off from the Moon on August 2, 1971, astronauts and Air Force pilots David Scott and James Irwin play a prerecorded instrumental version of the song. In 1937, Assistant Chief of the Air Corps Brig. Gen. Henry H. Arnold persuaded the Chief of the Air Corps, Maj. Gen. Oscar Westover, that the Air Corps needed an official song reflecting their unique identity in the same manner as the other military services, and proposed a song competition with a prize to the winner. However, the Air Corps did not control its budget, and could not give a prize. In April 1938, Bernarr A. Macfadden, publisher of Liberty magazine stepped in, offering a prize of $1,000 to the winning composer, stipulating that the song must be of simple “harmonic structure”, “within the limits of [an] ined voice”, and its beat in “march tempo of military pattern”.Over 700 compositions were received and evaluated by a volunteer committee of senior Air Corps wives with musical backgrounds chaired by Mildred Yount, the wife of Brig. Gen. Barton K. Yount. The committee had until July 1939 to make a final choice. However, word eventually spread that the committee did not find any songs that satisfied them, despite the great number of entries. Arnold, who became Chief of the Air Corps in 1938 after Westover was killed in a plane crash, solicited direct inquiries from professional composers and commercial publishers, including Meredith Willson and Irving Berlin, but not even Berlin’s creation proved satisfactory, although it was used as the title music to the 1943 play Winged Victory by Moss Hart.Two days before the deadline, music instructor Robert Crawford, a rejected World War One Air Service pilot and professional musician billed as “the Flying Baritone,” personally delivered a sound recording of his entry, which proved to be a unanimous winner.Mrs. Yount recalled that Rudolph Ganz, guest conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra and a consultant to the committee, was immediately and enthusiastically in favor of the winner.
The contest rules required the winner to submit his entry in written form, and Crawford immediately complied. However his original title, What Do You think of the Air Corps Now?, was soon officially changed to The Army Air Corps. Crawford himself publicly sang the song for the first time over national radio from the 1939 National Air Races. Not everyone was fond of the song. During a dinner of September 1939, Mrs. Yount played a recording of the song for Charles Lindbergh and asked his opinion. He responded politely to Yount, but years later remarked in a diary, “I think it is mediocre at best. Neither the music nor the words appealed to me.” Arnold did not share Lindbergh’s opinion: he sought to fund publication of band and ensemble arrangements of the song for nationwide distribution. However, the Air Corps did not have enough money to publicize the song, so Crawford arranged a transfer of the song’s copyright to New York music publisher Carl Fischer Inc., including a perpetual performance release in favor of the U.S. Air Force.