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In 1959, Belgian singer-songwriter Jacques Brel wrote and performed “Ne me quitte pas” (Don’t leave me), a visceral and haunting plea for his lover to come back. As a teenager, Maya Angela Smith was so captivated by Nina Simone’s powerful 1965 cover of the song that it inspired her to be a French professor. In Ne me quitte pas, Smith follows the classic song’s long and varied journey, from Brel’s iconic 1966 performance on French television to Simone’s cover to Shirley Bassey’s English-language version (“If You Go Away”) to its contemporary manifestations in popular culture. Throughout, Smith shows that as the song travels across languages, geographies, genres, and generations, it accumulates shifting artistic and cultural significance as each listener creates their own meaning.

Never Without a Song focuses on the centrality of folksong in the life of Jennie Devlin, a woman who worked for fourteen years as a "bound-out girl," or serving maid, along the New York-Pennsylvania border in the late 1800s. Largely ignored and unwanted, Devlin persevered through Dickensian misfortunes to find love and raise a family (often alone) in Philadelphia and Gloucester, New Jersey. Katharine Newman met Devlin in 1936 and compiled information about the older woman's life and music. Half a century later, Newman returned to her collection in retirement, with her own perspective of age. The result is a unique biography of an American working-class woman, told with depth and candor. Newman also includes "I Wish I'd Been Born a Boy," "James Bird," "Martha Decker," "My Grandmother's Old Armchair," and other pieces, both British and American, most with tunes.

WINNER OF THE ELIZABETH AGEE PRIZE IN AMERICAN LITERATURE

A groundbreaking appreciation of Dylan as a literary practitioner.

The literary establishment tends to regard Bob Dylan as an intriguing, if baffling, outsider. That changed overnight when Dylan was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, challenging us to think of him as an integral part of our national and international literary heritage. No One to Meet: Imitation and Originality in the Songs of Bob Dylan places Dylan the artist within a long tradition of literary production and offers an innovative way to understand his unique and often controversial methods of composition.

Dylan expert Raphael Falco traces the similarities between the way Dylan borrows, digests, and transforms traditional songs and what Renaissance writers called imitatio. Although Dylan’s lyrical postures may suggest an avant-garde consciousness, No One to Meet shows that Dylan’s creative process creatively expands methods used by classical and Renaissance authors.

Drawing on numerous examples, including Dylan’s previously unseen manuscript excerpts and archival materials, Raphael Falco illuminates how the ancient process of poetic imitation, handed down from Greco-Roman antiquity, allows us to make sense of Dylan’s musical and lyrical technique. By placing Dylan firmly in the context of an age-old poetic practice, No One to Meet deepens our appreciation of Dylan’s songs and allows us to celebrate him as what he truly is: a great writer.