Dublin Bay

A shipwreck ballad — Roy Neill and his young bride sail from Ireland in a gallant bark that strikes a rock three days out — with words by Mrs. Crawford and music by George Barker (1812–1876), circulating in sheet music by the mid-nineteenth century under this title and as “The Wreck of the Emigrant Ship” or “They Sail’d Away.” The pairing of emigration and drowning gave it a grim topicality in the famine decades, and it stayed in Irish-American songbooks well into the twentieth century.