Old thread to bump up, eh? It's way high up on google though, if you search for "crow jane skip james," so it's not as obscure as it's age might hint to forum users.

I think the last post was onto something. Note how similiar "Crow Jane" is to "Jim Crow," the term used for the set of laws and customs that relegated African Americans in the American South to a lower caste without much social value or any political power, which could even be freely murdered by whites. I suspect there's an element of reference to that too. "Jim Crow" also originates in a traditional song too, popularized among whites by a racist vaudville blackface performer (check this for that version of the tune: http://www.berea.edu/faculty/browners/chesnutt/graphics/017.044a.001.mus.JPEG and http://www.berea.edu/faculty/browners/chesnutt/graphics/017.044a.002.mus.JPEG). Crow, of course, was written during the period following emancipation of the slaves, in which black Americans had been restripped of their rights, economically almost reenslaved, etc. It was common during slavery and afterward for slaves and freemen/freewomen to sing songs about their conditions/oppression in code, for instance, many songs about men running out on women are just as much about a slave escaping the slave labor camp ("plantation") or a sharecropper running out on his wrongly created debts as they are about a husband running out on his woman. Frequently, they literally were meant to be both about the obvious meaning (killing a lover, running away from a spouse) and the coded meaning (killing the slavemaster/land owner, running away from the plantation/rented land).

Ignoring that aspect, in my opinion, is highly naive. It's level of tragic cynicism/despair for the future is heavily underlined when you think of the coded meaning and these words

"Didn’t missed crow jane until she…
Till the day she died, till the day she…"

So, Jim Crow is done and over, and even then, are things getting worse, potentially? The end of Jim Crow means more turmoil purpose, an uncertain world, perhaps an even worse phase in history, much like "the nadir" that followed in the decades following emancipation, with epidemics of mass murder, lynching, mass rape, etc, of freed slaves and their children. Or it could be just missing what's bad for you. Or could just be added to add a morality white folk would approve of? Who knows? It confuses me, to be frank... but I'm sure the song is partially meant to be dealing with Jim Crow... even if it originates before "Jim Crow" was called that, the lyrics of such songs change with time, and even their meaning changes with new performers and audiences and events, and it couldn't have helped but absorb the "killing Jim Crow" meaning. Think about the time when Skip James recorded the standard tuning version, in the 60s... as Jim Crow was really crashing down to die... (not to say things are shiny and happy now in the South or America@Large).