Survival Songs

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).

Stephanie Sieburth is a professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Studies at Duke University.

Roberta Johnson, Emerita, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Kansas:
“Survival Songs is an ambitious book based on a vast amount of research in several fields – Spanish popular culture, Spanish history, psychoanalytic theory, and musicology. All of the information from these fields is deftly woven into a compelling narrative about the importance of the popular music genre, the copla, in helping to heal the psychological wounds suffered especially by those on the losing side of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939).”