Ragged Hungry Blues

During her New York stay [1931], Aunt Molly Jackson visited Columbia's studios to make her only commercial recording. The circumstances behind this session are unknown, but it was probably instigated by songwriter/publisher Bob Miller, then supervising sessions for Columbia's 15000 series aimed at white rural audiences. Four masters were cut, including... both parts of her Ragged Hungry Blues. She later talked about the latter song for the Library of Congress, reprinted in Greenway's 'American Folksongs of Protest':



"On the seventh day of May, 19 and 30, during the strike, the miners built a ‎soup kitchen out of slabs over in a meadow. When it was finished I told all of the wives to bring ‎everything we had from our mining shacks and put it all together, and go around and collect ‎vegetables from the farmers to make soup as long as the farmers had anything to give. By the ‎middle of October we was desperate; we did not see how we was going to live. For two or three ‎days we did not have anything to make soup out of. On the 17th morning in October my sister‘s ‎little girls waked me up early. She had 15 little ragged children and she was taking them around to ‎the soup kitchen to try to get them a bowl of soup. She told me some of them children had not eat ‎anything in two days. It was a cold rainy morning; the little children was all bare-footed, and the ‎blood was running out of the tops of their little feet and dripping down between their little toes onto ‎the ground. You could track them to the soup kitchen by the blood. After they had passed by I just ‎set down by the table and began to wonder what to try to do next. Then I began to sing out my blues ‎to express my feeling. This song comes from the heart and not just from the point of a pen." (Aunt ‎Molly Jackson)