Songfacts®:

• "Rag and bone man" is a British term for a guy who goes door to door collecting junk. Jack White got the idea from his wife, British model Karen Elson, who told him that as a kid she wanted to go off with the rag and bone men.
• In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, White said: "I think songwriters are all junk collectors at heart: We take other people's problems and try to make something beautiful out of them."
• There are drawings on goldfish on the record sleeve because the rag and bone men used to bring the fish with them for the kids, who would scrounge around for junk in exchange for them.
• Jack and Meg White both contribute vocals on this song.
• In an interview with Uncut magazine, Jack White was asked about the influence of his wife on his songwriting. The White Stripes front man replied that his wife is "completely inspiring" to him. He said: "She's always throwing this stuff out, half the time to make me laugh, like this rag and bone thing - when she was a little girl she wanted to run away with the rag and bone men, because she thought they were going to an exotic land. She tells me these things, pretty soon you're playing a riff and yelling "Rag and bone!"
• In the same interview Jack White was asked how the Icky Thump album came to be. He replied: "The Raconteurs tour was ending, and I called Meg up and said, 'I've got some time coming up here in December and January - maybe we should get together,' I had some things cooking, and we had a couple of songs which we didn't get to put on Satan, so she moved to Nashville for a couple of months, and we started hammering it out. You just start doing it. This is the first album where I had a chalkboard on the wall, to write down the names of things. We recorded in January, but in December, that chalkboard was empty. We had a couple of riffs, but not one finished song. A lot was written in the studio, and this happens a lot with us - only for the first album did we actually have songs written."