All the Way to Galway

A traditional Irish reel (4/4) or march/polka (2/4) in D Mixolydian, this tune circulated with a Jacobite-era song whose lyrical burden described the march of the Galway militia, a fact recorded by Crofton Crocker as early as 1839. Its earliest known printed appearance is in Glasgow publisher James Aird’s Selection of Scotch, English, Irish and Foreign Airs (1780–1803), where it appears under the title “Galway Girls,” and it was collected in the 1840s from the playing of Paddy Conneely, the Galway Piper, by collectors William Forde and Henry Hudson. Irish musicologist W.H. Grattan Flood argued in 1906 that “Yankee Doodle” derives from this tune, noting the resemblance in the second strain, though this origin claim remains contested and is one of several proposed sources for that melody. The Chieftains recorded the tune on Chieftains 3 (Green Linnet SIF 3005), and the Bothy Band included it on Old Hag You Have Killed Me (originally Mulligan, 1976; reissued 1981).