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'' along the New York-Pennsylvania border and later lived 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. It 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.
