Hi, Susan - here's what I found in the All-Music Guide:

Aunt Molly Jackson was not only an old-time country singer/songwriter who spent much of her career trying to preserve the traditional mountain folksongs of her native Kentucky, she was also influential in the struggle for miners' rights during the '20s and '30s. She was born Mary Magdalene Garland in Clay County, Kentucky. When she was only six, her mother starved to death; she married at 14 and then watched as the coalmines killed her brother, husband and son. Shortly thereafter, Jackson began to express her grief and anger by writing songs such as "Poor Miner's Farewell" and "Dishonest Miller." Through the 1920s, Jackson continued to work for miners' rights; in 1931, she went to New York and recorded a single containing "Kentucky Miner's Wife." She relocated to New York to continue her fight, befriending other musicians on the New York folk scene including Woody Guthrie. In 1935, folklorists Alan Lomax and Mary Barnicle convinced Jackson to record 150 songs for the Library of Congress, which took her four years. After appearing with Leadbelly and Josh White in the Cavalcade of American Song in 1940, Jackson eventually settled in California, where she lived until the folk revival of the late '50s. Her music was an important part of that revival, although Aunt Molly never received a single dime in royalties for the protest songs she had written. In 1960, impoverished and nearly forgotten, Jackson was working on an autobiographical LP with John Greenway when she died suddenly. During the 1970s, some of the songs she recorded for the Library of Congress were released on a Rounder anthology. -- Sandra Brennan, All-Music Guide

I understand Aunt Molly Jackson spent at least some of her final years here in Sacramento. she had some sort of chest injury that made it difficult for her to sing.
-Joe Offer-