Garryowen - The Real 7th Cavalry Lyrics (1905) | Military March

"Garryowen" is not a military song. It started as a drinking song about smashing windows and brawling with the night watch on a hillside in Limerick. The 7th Cavalry took the tune in 1867 - but the words everyone sings in it today were written almost forty years later, by the regiment's own bandmaster, for men about to sail to a different war. This is that version. It is rarely recorded. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ THE STORY BEHIND THE SONG Garryowen is a real place. It sits on a slope outside the city of Limerick, and the name is two Irish words joined together - Garraí Eoin, Owen's Garden. In the late 1700s it was where a crowd of young men did their drinking, and the song that carries its name is about exactly what you would expect: breaking glass, fighting the watch, paying no bills, and finding nothing in the world worth taking seriously. There is not one word in it about a flag, a country, or a regiment. The old verses are usually attributed to the Irish poet Thomas Moore, around 1807, though the tune and the carousing it describes are older than that. It reached the United States Army the way most things reach armies -carried by the men themselves. The air came in informally somewhere between 1861 and 1866 as a quickstep, and its use was first documented in 1867, when it was adopted as the official air of the 7th U.S. Cavalry Regiment. The story usually told is that George Custer brought it. He did not. Credit belongs to Captain Myles Keogh, an Irishman who had served in the 5th Royal Irish Lancers and in the Papal Guard before he came to America, and who arrived in the regiment with the tune already in him. Custer heard it sung by an Irish trooper and kept it for one reason that has nothing to do with sentiment: the tempo matched a horse at the trot. The song fit the gait. Keogh was killed at the Little Bighorn in 1876. The tune he carried over outlasted every man who rode with him. The words in this recording are not his and not Custer's. In 1905, Chief Musician J.O. Brockenshire of the 7th Cavalry Band reworked the music and wrote these stanzas and this chorus - "In the Fighting Seventh's the place for me" - for his own regiment, as it prepared to deploy to the Philippines. That is why the first verse says "from sixty-six on down." Eighteen sixty-six is the year the 7th Cavalry was raised, organised that September at Fort Riley, Kansas. A bandmaster writing in 1905 was reminding his regiment it was already thirty-nine years old. These are the words the regiment actually uses. They are also the words almost nobody records. Search for "Garryowen" and you will find the Irish drinking song, or a band playing the march with no vocal at all. The sung regimental version - the one with Brockenshire's chorus in it - is far harder to find than a song this old and this widely known has any right to be. That is why we recorded it: fife, rope-tension snare, and a room of voices, which is roughly what it would have sounded like coming out of a regimental band in 1905. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ AI DISCLOSURE This rendition was produced using AI-assisted vocal and instrumental generation, arranged and directed by Aura Vault. The air "Garryowen" is traditional. The 1905 lyrics are by Chief Musician J.O. Brockenshire of the 7th U.S. Cavalry Band and are in the public domain. This arrangement and recording are original to Aura Vault. The visuals are illustrative rather than archival. No affiliation with the United States Army, the 7th Cavalry Regiment, the 1st Cavalry Division or any associated organisation is claimed or implied. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🎼 LISTEN TO AURA VAULT 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/0H6Rt24dv1rndNWGAp8HtS 🍎 Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/artist/aura-vault/6802022613 🎵 Who'll Stop The Rain — Fogerty Wrote About Woodstock. The Boys In Vietnam Heard A Prayer: https://youtu.be/nlGZC4x8r3A 🎵 Green River — Fogerty Wrote About a Creek in California. The War Heard Something Else: https://youtu.be/ACMJWtAxpPo 🎵 Eve of Destruction — A Warm-Up Take That Leaked, Got Banned, and Went to Number One: https://youtu.be/M50GT2AHCC0 🎵 Ghost Riders In The Sky — Stan Jones Wrote About Damned Cowboys. Huey Pilots Heard Themselves: https://youtu.be/cDaPf1evbzI 🎵 Paint It, Black — A Grief Song Disguised As A Rock Anthem: https://youtu.be/7EH4Ola-2Jc 🎵 A Whiter Shade of Pale — All Four Verses, Including the Two Nobody Hears: https://youtu.be/qhoZMlnKnGE 🌍 Songs of the Vietnam Era Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzKgdMMjRxDqlUY0B6FcHowh9pKv8it1L ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ — Aura Vault | Music, History, Respect #Garryowen #7thCavalry #1stCavalryDivision #MilitaryHistory #AuraVault