Galway Bay, the songs
The song emigrants sang about the bay was written in Leicester by a doctor and recorded in Hollywood by Bing Crosby. The older one, the one the Galway singer Dolores Keane made her own, was written in London by a Kinvara man. And a Galway rock band put out a third with the same name in 1988. If you are looking for Galway Bay, the song, you may be looking for any of them.
Checked against the source on 2026-09-19.
Fahy's song
Francis Fahy, born in Kinvara on the shore of the bay in 1854, wrote My Own Dear Galway Bay in London to the air of Skibbereen. Emmett O'Toole recorded it first in 1927; Frank Harte and Dónal Lunny put it on The Hungry Voice in 2004. Tony Small of the Galway band Wild Geese set it to a different air on Flight 2 in 1979, and Dolores Keane's 1983 recording made that the version everyone knows. It also goes by Galway Bay and The Old Galway Bay.
Crosby's song
Dr Arthur Colahan wrote the second Galway Bay in Leicester in 1947. Bing Crosby recorded it with Victor Young's orchestra on 27 November 1947, changing some lines to make it less political, so that the people speak a language that the strangers do not know rather than the English. It was a huge hit among Irish emigrants everywhere and reached number three on the Billboard chart; Crosby sang it again in Dublin in 1966 for a television show. Toasted Heretic's unrelated Galway Bay opened their 1988 debut Songs for Swinging Celibates and was re-recorded in 1992. The model on this page pins the Spanish Arch and the Claddagh, where the bay begins; the Galway Bay guide covers the water itself.
Questions people ask
Who wrote Galway Bay?
Did Bing Crosby change the words of Galway Bay?
Written from Wikipedia, "Galway Bay (song)" (CC BY-SA 4.0), read on 2026-09-19, and from the OpenStreetMap places on the model. Nothing has been added from memory; follow the source for its footnotes.