Biography
Only a pair of performances by Ozella Jones are documented, both captured in 1936 by Alan Lomax and Zora Neale Hurston at the State Farm in Raiford, FL, during work for the Archive of American Folk Song project. Her solo delivery of the weary, wistful, and haunting "Prisoner Blues"—sometimes catalogued as "I Been a Bad, Bad Girl" owing to its loose adaptation of Barefoot Bill's "Bad Boy," issued by Columbia Records in 1930—stands as a genuine marvel on the May 4, 1936 recording. Two days afterward, on May 6, she partnered with Annie May Jefferson for their reading of "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" at the same facility. No further information survives about her life, yet the account she offers on "Prisoner Blues" lifts one instant of it into lasting clarity.