Collection of Irish Song Lyrics
The Galway Ghost
My name is Seamus Ryan from a farm outside Lochrae.
And I always intended to live there all my days.
But when I was young, just twenty one, in a drunken barroom fight,
I killed a man and away I ran; I was hunted day and night.
I sailed away, to Amerikay, to the sidewalks of New York.
So far away from Galway Bay, from Dublin and from Cork....
And I can't go back, for love or craic, to my native land again.
I'm a Yankee now, and that is how I'll stay 'til my life's end.
And now the name I gave myself to lead an exile's life.
And I never told another soul, and never took a wife.
I thumbed my way through the USA, I roamed from coast to coast.
So all alone, so far from home, I was called the Galway Ghost.
In Amerikay, I went astray, and battled men and law.
With gun and knife, I carved my life, it was my tragic flaw.
In Albany I tried to flee, the warden's on my trail.
But they captured me, they shackled me, they entombed me in this jail.
When I was young and on the run, from the life I left behind,
I'd rather drink than think the thoughts, that now prey on my mind,
Of the Galway sky and days gone by and the girl who loves me most,
So raise your glass to the haunted past of Seamus Ryan's ghost.
*Thanks to Sadie for the submission to the archive
