i get a kick out of that song... few people realize that "black betty" is an archaic term for a flintlock rifle.
as far as not hearing anything else from them.... there's a lot of bands that were "one-hit wonders" where the band had one big hit, and that was all. if the song was released on an album (if you can still find a copy of it) the one song that was brilliant is the hit, some of the other songs might be ok-to-good, and the rest not so good. so depending on that you might see a one hit wonder band either only did that one album, or did a couple more that weren't so good. record companies used to call the albums "loss leaders" and you could buy them real cheap. occasionally you might find a "loss leader" album that was really good, but poor timing on when it was released (like Deep Purple's "Concerto for Group and Orchestra" being released in 1969, at least 2 years before "Progressive Rock" became popular).
Here is another version....a little closer to the "original" (and he probably didn't write it either) ...little known fact: that clapping sound you hear is actually Ledbelly smacking Ram Jam and Tom Jones
My daughter and her friend Charlie did a cover of this, it's a great song - some interesting lyrics in it, which we had to look up to see what they meant
I've finally got the stereo in my new car doing what I want - I had it set to random, playing tracks from a USB drive. Trouble was, it WAS random, so it tended to play the same songs quite a lot - a Sony stereo I fitted in a car a while back shuffled the tracks randomly, and then played them sequentially in that random order - this one seems to pick a random track every time it changes tracks (so can even play the same track twice).
I managed to find a program (bulk rename), and using that I randomly sorted the tracks on my drive (1030 of them) and then renamed the tracks with a numerical prefix (starting at 0001_ and increasing from there). I've got the stereo set to play them in order, based on folder position - works perfectly.
The track and title names are still correct, as it takes those from the ID3 data in the MP3 files.
BTW, Barracuda was one of the tracks it was very fond of playing a lot