ITunes sync does not delete songs from iPhone

I've an older iPhone 4 with only 8GB of memory.  (also another iPhone 5s/16G, and iPad/64G and a iPod Classic with 160GB).
The IP4 is always short of memory, so I rotate songs based on a small smart playlist based on "least recently played."
I've NEVER used iTunes Match, or iTunes on the cloud or iTunes Genius, and I've always synced these devices using the same iTunes Library.
Nine albums weren't rotating off the iPhone, so I turned off all music syncs and expected the albums to go away.   They remained.
Adding the albums back to the sync had the strange effect of duplicating all the songs in the album.  Removing the albums left the ghosts behind.
Any suggestions on how to remove these 9 albums / 85 songs?

Hello there, Jon.
Although the the error message in the title of the following Knowledge Base article may make it seem unrelated to your situation, it addresses issues that arise with orphaned files that may still be on your device:
iOS: "Not enough free space" alert when trying to sync
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1503
Try disconnecting and reconnecting your device, then syncing again to solve this issue.
Orphaned files may remain on your iOS device if it is physically disconnected while syncing music, podcasts, videos, or photos. This can prevent iTunes from syncing the iOS device on subsequent sync sessions. When this happens, the Capacity indicator in iTunes may report a large amount of "Other" disk usage for the iOS device. To resolve this issue:
Turn off the music or photo sync option in iTunes for the device.
Click Apply to sync the changes to the device.
Turn the music and photo sync options for the device on again.
Click Apply again to try to sync the device to iTunes.
If the 'Not enough free space' alert appears, continue to step 5.
Turn off the automatic syncing functions for the iOS device. To do this:
Select the iOS device from the iTunes window and click the Summary tab.
Deselect "Automatically sync when this device is connected" and select the "Sync only checked songs and videos" checkbox.
Click Apply to sync the changes to the device.
Reduce the amount of data that is being synced to the device and resync the device. For example, if syncing your Music library exceeds the memory capacity of the device, choose "Selected playlists" to transfer rather than "All songs and playlists" under the Music tab in iTunes.
If the 'Not enough free space' alert appears, continue to step 6.
Restore using iTunes.
Thanks for reaching out to Apple Support Communities.
Cheers,
Pedro.

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