"Down on Penny’s Farm" is a song about the hard times of a sharecrop farmer. After the Civil War the promised "40 acres and a mule" never materialized for the former slaves and the returning Confederate soldiers had no money to buy land. The old slave quarters were now used for new types of de facto slavery: one where the tenant owed the landowner half of the crops grown plus more for food and supplies until harvest and another where the tenent simply owed the landowner money. The "mortgage" in the song was a "chattel mortgage", backed by the farmer's few possessions and next year's crops. The Bently Boys from North Carolina recorded "Down on Penny’s Farm" in 1929 for Columbia Records. It featured banjo and guitar and the flip side track "Henhouse Blues" also featured a fiddle player. Apparently they didn’t record anything else but their version of "Penny’s Farm", which was included in The Anthology of American Folk Music, inspired the young Bob Dylan for one of the first song he wrote when he came to New York City, "Hard times in New York Town". It would also inspire him to write his "Maggie’s Farm" a few years after. Harry Smith said that “Penny’s Farm” was "a regionalized recasting of an earlier song called 'Hard times'". It was also recorded by The Skillet Lickers, Pete Seeger, The Holy Modal Rounders and others. It was printed in Alan Lomax's Folk Songs of North America. This is Pete Seeger's version from his Darlin' Cory album.