How can a song help the hungry and persecuted to survive? Stephanie Sieburth's Survival Songs explores how a genre of Spanish popular music, the copla, as sung by legendary performer Conchita Piquer, helped Republican sympathizers to survive the Franco regime's dehumanizing treatment following the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Piquer's coplas were sad, bitter stories of fallen women, but they offered a way for the defeated to cope with chronic terror,...