Gadfly
2006
Bittersweet Sixteen
About This Album
Black 47 and Gadfly Records were faced with a challenge in compiling a retrospective on the band, since, over the first 16 years of their existence, in addition to their self-released and Gadfly discs, Black 47 made recordings for three other companies -- two of them subsidiaries of major labels -- from which the music could not be licensed. The solution, of course, was to use other versions of some of the songs in question, and "to the rescue," as annotator and bandleader Larry Kirwan puts it, came disc jockey Vin Scelsa, "who provided a long lost live studio recording considered by many stronger than our actual CD performances." That made available six songs originally heard on out of print major-label albums like Home of the Brave and Green Suede Shoes. Then there are four tracks drawn from the Gadfly records; an early version of the song "Home of the Brave"; a previously unreleased early mix of "Funky Ceili"; and four previously unrecorded songs -- a cover of Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth," the Kirwan original "Southside Chicago Waltz," a cover of Brendan Behan's "Patriot Game," and an a cappella rendition of union organizer Joe Hill's poem "Joe Hill's Last Will.
Track List (try tracks 1,2 and 9)

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