While Rory Gallagher fans wait to learn if the Rory Gallagher International Tribute Festival will survive the disaster that deprived the festival of half its revenue this year due to the collapse of its ticketing service, aficionados of the late guitarist will have the opportunity to look back over his career and music thanks to the imminent release of a book chronicling his musical journey.
That book was written by the guitarist’s brother, Donal Gallagher, who was with Rory on every step of his musical journey — first as a roadie, then as the road manager for his touring band and, ultimately, his business manager, sometimes fulfilling all three roles at once. That book is coming out Nov. 25 from Red Stripe Press and is entitled Edged In Blue: A Rock and Roll Odyssey with Rory Gallagher.
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Since the passing of Rory Gallagher in 1995, his brother Donal has continued to protect the music and legacy of the legendary guitarist, as well as managing his estate. Those responsibilities include managing the guitarist’s musical assets, which include his Strange Music publishing, and helping the Universal Music Group’s catalog division UMe to promote his brother’s recorded music catalog.
As the guitarist died without a will, his mother was the immediate beneficiary. But with her passing in 2010, Donal Gallagher is now the beneficiary overseeing the estate, aided by two of his four children, Daniel and Eoin.
Starting in the late 1960s, Gallagher recorded two studio albums and two live albums with Taste, a band he founded and anchored while writing most of its songs; and, as a solo artist, recorded 11 studio albums and three live albums under his own name before his death, which were released on a variety of record labels. There have also been numerous compilations, live albums and DVDs released in the 30 years since his death, too. “The DVDs help build on Rory’s legacy because newcomers to Gallagher’s music can see Rory’s amazing live performances,” Donal says.
Gallagher was fortunate enough to ultimately own all his master recordings and publishing catalogs. But around 2017, Donal Gallagher says he sold the master recordings to UMG because it became too difficult to police and protect Gallagher’s music as streaming came on — especially with the proliferation of Rory’s music placed on digital services without Donal’s knowledge through user-generated content and piracy.
How Gallagher came to own his solo master recordings is a story unto itself. As Taste was winding down, at one of the group’s shows in 1970, Donal was unloading the band’s equipment when a big guy offered to help. That stranger turned out to be Peter Grant, the legendary and innovative manager of Led Zeppelin. Grant was at the show because he managed that night’s opening band, Stone the Crows, and Donal remembers him saying, “Why doesn’t Rory come around and have a chat at some point?”
When Gallagher was preparing to go solo, Polydor, Taste’s label, was keen to keep Rory on the roster and reminded him he was under contract with them for life, Donal says. But Gallagher’s fortunes quickly changed once Grant became involved. The former ex-wrestler was a gigantic man who ripped up Gallagher’s contract in a meeting with the Polydor president on Rory’s behalf and demanded the label give Gallagher a better contract. He succeeded: “It was a six album deal and a [ownership] reversion to Rory seven years after the delivery of the last album,” Donal says.
Grant wanted to be Rory’s manager, but friction at a meeting with one of Grant’s minions scuppered the arrangement. Nevertheless, Rory signed his new Polydor deal in 1971, and then “proceeded to do two albums a year,” Donal says. “By 1975, Rory was out of contract.” The catalog reverted to him in 1982, and his original and subsequent albums were released either through licensing deals or, eventually, through his own Capo Music, until Donal sold them to UMG. Meanwhile, the Taste albums remained at Polydor and are now controlled by UMG, since Universal absorbed Polydor as part of its 1998 merger with Polygram.
Gallagher always owned his publishing, and formally incorporated that ownership by forming Strange Music in 1972 — and that is not an inconsiderable asset. While Gallagher is known for his love of the blues and some of his most well-known songs in the early days were covers like “Bullfrog Blues,” “Messin with the Kid” and “Out on the Western Plains,” the vast majority of the music on his many studio albums was written solely by Gallagher himself.
Donall Gallagher (Courtesy Donall Gallagher)Gallagher was always a force in the rock landscape because of his ferocious live shows and seemingly endless touring, but his star was much brighter in Europe than it was in the U.S. Since 1991, U.S. sales of his album catalog have totaled 460,000 album consumption units, according to Luminate. While a breakout of his global sales history cannot be independently confirmed by Billboard, past liner notes from one of the compilation album titles claimed he had accumulated a total of 20 million global album sales.
That’s not obvious by looking at the Billboard charts. In the 1970s, his peak commercial period, nine of Gallagher’s albums — six studio, two live and one compilation — made it into the Billboard 200. But not one of them made it into the top half of that chart; the Rory Gallagher Live album came the closest, peaking at No. 101 in November 1972.
However, in the 21st century, 13 of his albums have made it onto Billboard’s Blues Albums chart, with 11 of them reaching the top 10, and Check Shirt Wizard: Live in 77 hitting No. 1 in March 2020. Also of note, the BPI has awarded Gallagher’s album catalog eight BRIT awards (activity of 100,000 units or more) and seven silver albums (activity of 60,000 units or more).
Lately, his album catalog annually generates between 5,000 and 6,000 album equivalent units a year in the U.S., with most of that coming from streaming, according to Luminate. His annual streaming total in the U.S. annually averages a little more than 6 million plays; globally, the annual average is around 35 million plays.
While the Rory Gallagher International Festival helps promote the legacy of the guitarist, the estate doesn’t directly benefit financially from the event, except for any performance royalties it might receive from IMRO (the Irish Music Rights Organization). But Donal and his sons are busy working Rory’s music and his legacy in other ways. Since his brother’s death, the estate has put out live albums, greatest hits albums and unreleased music like the Wheels Within Wheels album in 2003. And beyond working the music catalog, a coffee table picture book came out March titled Gallagher’s Guitars, written by Julien Bitoun with photography by Eleanor Jane and a foreword by Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, carrying a $75 list price.
One of the hardest decisions Donal had to make involved selling the many guitars photographed in the book. In October 2024, an auction for Gallagher’s guitars and musical equipment brought in nearly $2 million from various bidders. That sale included Gallagher’s famous 1961 Fender Stratocaster which he wore down to the bone with most of its paint chipped off, which sold for $1.2 million. The purchaser was Live Nation Gaiety Ltd., which subsequently lent it to the National Museum of Ireland, where it is currently on public display. Since 2004, Fender’s Custom Shop has sold a replica version, after an initial run of 40 were made in the 1970s.
“The Rory Gallagher tribute model is regarded as helping start the fan-based relic guitar phenomenon,” says Donal Gallagher’s son Daniel, who works in the family business at Strange Music. Daniel adds that the Gallagher “replica has been played onstage by plenty of recording acts such as Linkin Park and Carlos Santana at their live concerts.”
Beyond the obvious merch opportunities, the estate has also been involved in issues of Rory-themed stamps and coins; for this year’s Record Store Day, the estate was involved in a 50th anniversary edition of Rory’s Calling Card album. And in June, one of Gallagher’s biggest fans, Joe Bonamassa, released The Spirit of Rory — Live From Cork, which captured Gallagher songs he played over three sold out shows in July 2025 at the Marquee in the Irish city.
His legacy lives on all over the Emerald Isle. There are memorials and streets named for him in Dublin and Cork, the latter of which is home to Rory Gallagher Place with a memorial sculpture and Rory Gallagher Avenue, which leads to the Cork Airport, as well as a Cork Rocks for Rory fest, in its second year. There are statues of him in his hometown of Ballyshannon and in Belfast, a city which embraced Gallagher as one of the few artists who crossed the Northern Ireland border each holiday season to play concerts during the Troubles as a way to bring kids from both sides of the conflict together with music.
And that extends beyond Ireland. The Paris suburb of Ris-Orangis is home to a Rue Rory Gallagher. A fan at the Ballyshannon Festival told Billboard about a Rory Gallagher Italian Tribute Nights event with bands from Italy, Ireland and France that was about to celebrate its ninth edition. The annual Oslo Rory Nights event is at least 15 years old, as is the Rory Gallagher Festival U.K. There are also annual Rory Gallagher tribute events in Vienna, Greece, the Netherlands, Germany and Tokyo, Daniel Gallagher says.
Things are looking better for the Rory Gallagher International Tribute Festival now that a GoFundMe effort has raised almost 99,000 euros, and the upcoming One Great Day benefit show in Dublin on Oct. 31 will help raise additional fundings, all of which gives the Rory Gallagher International Tribute Festival founder and operator Barry O’Neill hope that “after a tough three months,” the 24th edition of the festival will happen in 2027. But, whatever winds up being the ultimate fate of the Gallagher Festival, the guitarist’s legacy will not soon be forgotten, thanks to his fans and his family. In the foreword of the forthcoming Donal Gallagher book, Bonamassa paid tribute to that work: “I have always admired how Donal and his son Daniel have handled Rory’s legacy over the years since he left us.”
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