Ronald Caplan's account of his search for song and obituary poetry and the tools for community survival in northern Cape Breton, as he learned about the in-home singing tradition and the community's extraordinary devotion to the poet Andrew Dunphy—a person who might in other places have been an outcast. A hundred years before, Dunphy roamed northern Cape Breton, sharing the news, nursing the sick, often caring for small children. And he wrote magnificent obituary poems that, with great respect, his neighbours turned into popular song. Told in the words of those who knew Andrew Dunphy,—in A Stone for Andrew Dunphy Caplan preserves the robust life that flourished in the Aspy Bay region as the 20th century dawned.