I think that Black 47 are great--

The songs tell honest, painful, and often funny stories about the immigrant experience, which is really a fundamental part of the American experience--the thing is that they are stories from the present--usually, our immigrant stories are museum pieces--old restored photos, scratchy recordings, diaries, and old letters, part of a quaint and remote past--

The reason Black 47 is so important is that Larry Kirwan's songs lay out the conflicts, issues, struggles, the great losses and small victories here in the present, and shares the raw emotions that go along with them without the filter of "nostalgia"--