Whatever constitutes American folk music, a huge portion of it is embellished storytelling. In any number of songs, listeners are going to find shocking imagery set aside some social meaning and political intent. Not always, but there are huge numbers of songs working on combining biblical tales, then current living situations and a desire to surpass it all.

Aunt Molly Jackson, a Kentucky born women who moved to New York during the thirties, might be one of the most vociferous singers in the history of recorded music. Recently – well within the last four decades or so – there’s been a bevy of vocal critic as musicians kicking around. But those folks seem that they’ve come to their style as a musician seeking a hook. Aunt Molly, though, started writing songs to protest various life situations when she was four years old.

Living through the depression in a part of the country that seems permanently depressed, Aunt Molly became a midwife during her early teens. The job accounts for her name as well – the accepted mode of referring to midwives was to call them Granny. Molly, being so young, decided she should just be an aunt. It stuck.

Living in Kentucky and assisting coal miner’s families – of which she was a part herself – granted Aunt Molly a personal view of the rampant poverty so pervasive and inescapable in the area. Having begun something of a career in protest songs, what Aunt Molly saw spurred her on to write more tunes.

Her passion for righting the transgressions she perceived eventually translated into action as Aunt Molly – reportedly, although versions of all her stories varied – went into a company store and at gun point demanded food for families incapable of providing for themselves. Even if that’s just a story, though, the fact that it’s been related and passed along for such a long time points to some semblance of reality.

All of Aunt Molly’s actions – from purported theft to union organizing and protests – eventually made her something of a star. And on a trip to raise money for coal miners, Aunt Molly, while in New York, got a chance to record a few songs. She wasn’t recorded frequently, and always sans accompaniment, but what she got down, with the assistance of Alan Lomax and Folkways, constitutes a blueprint for what would become the protest and folk revival that took place in the fifties and sixties in the Big Apple.

Hearing those tapes today, it’s not difficult to figure why Aunt Molly was instrumental in the burgeoning politicism the resulted post-depression era. She too could be thought of as an important figure in feminism – apart from being a vocal proponent of the down trodden, she was associated with a milieu most commonly occupied by men.

Apart from the historical impact that her songs had, musically, Aunt Molly isn’t going to be too enticing to modern audiences. As an historical thing, there aren’t too many recordings surpassing these. As pure entertainment, it’s not much – Aunt Molly probably didn’t care about that, though.