Pick Poor Robin Clean reconsidered
One of my favorite songs from our third CD is our cover of the old raggy blues tune Pick Poor Robin Clean. Luke Jordan and Geeshie Wiley each recorded fantastic versions of it, Jordan in 1927 for Victor, Wiley in 1931 for Paramount.
The song’s lyrics were long a puzzle to me. I had long assumed that it was a song about desperate poverty. The first verse seemed to suggest a person driven to desperate measures:
You Gotta pick poor robin clean
Pick poor robin clean
I picked the head, I picked the feet
I woulda picked the body but it wasn’t fit to eat
You gotta pick poor robin clean
Pick poor robin clean
I’ll be satisfied, having your family
I’ve recently been reading Stephen Calt’s interesting Barrelhouse Words: A Blues Dialect Dictionary
[Poor robin is,] most likely, a ragged person, from the 19-century colloquialism ragged robin. In the above song, the subject is left penniless by a crooked gambler, clean signifying completely without funds in criminal slang, and to clean, to rob one of everything of value.
Here’s our version, and you can see if you agree with Calt’s interpretation.
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