Patrick Conway was born July 4, 1867 in Troy, New York and was educated at the Homer Academy. At age fifteen, after the death of his father, he worked at a carriage factory where he learned to play the cornet from a fellow worker, also director of the Homer Band. Conway joined the band and became its director within a few years after which he completed his music education at the Ithaca Conservatory and Cornell University. After moving to Ithaca to become part of the Cornell music faculty in 1895, he organized the Cornell Cadet Band and directed it until 1908; organized and directed the Ithaca Band; and directed the Lyceum Theater orchestra in Ithaca. In 1908 the Ithaca Band changed its name to Patrick Conway and His Band and during summers toured the mid-western and western United States performing at state fairs and such expositions as the Panama-Pacific Exposition (1915), as well as regular venues in Willow Grove Park, Philadelphia, and Young's Pier, Atlantic City. He also organized the air corps' first band during the First World War after being commissioned a captain in the U. S. Army Air Service. He returned to Ithaca after the war and founded the Conway Military Band School which was an affiliate of the Ithaca Conservatory of Music, teaching there from 1922 until his death in 1929.