Peter, I just had a look in one of Paul Oliver's books and you may be interested in this quote about 'Pick Poor Robin Clean':

Though Wiley and Thomas are recalled in both Mississippi and Texas, their origins are uncertain; 'Geechie' means an inhabitant of the Georgia Sea Islands. The song ['Robin'] was earlier recorded by the Virginia songster Luke Jordan, and was popular as far west as Kansas City where it was heard by the black writer Ralph Ellison: 'Poor Robin was picked again and again and his pluckers were ever unnamed and mysterious. Yet the tune was inevitably productive of laughter - even when ourselves were its object. For each of us recognised that somehow his fate was our own. Our defeats and failures - even our final defeat by death - were loaded on his back and given ironic significance and thus made more bearable'[Ralph Ellison 'Shadow and Act' Secker and Warburg 1967, p231]. Though its origins are unknown, its wide diffusion and 'nigger' and 'coon' references suggest that this was yet another song dating from early in the century when the 'jaybird laughed' at the subjugation of blacks. [Paul Oliver 'Songsters & Saints: Vocal Traditions on Race Records' Cambridge Uni Press 1984, p126].

I have previously posted the lyrics to 'Robin' somewhere in the forum.

--Stewie.