The year his father dies Garth becomes intimately involved with Olivia Sumner the white daughter of an English bred plantation owner, but over the course of a short autumn season Olivia loses interest in the boy she first seduced on Crocket's Creek.
The following year Garth's mother sells the family's small sharecrop-farm and he and Ben Henry move to Baton Rouge where they soon discover it's no cakewalk jumpstarting a blues career in a town surrounded by the Mississippi River. Or is it? A young woman with the guitar playing fingers of a blues master breathes life back into the boys' dreams-of getting happy rich singing the blues.
In a fateful return trip to Ricochet, Garth finds himself in lover's arms with the talented girl from Baton Rouge. But the lovers are violently whisked away from each other by a crooked sheriff, hurtful parish judge and Olivia Sumner's father, three men who create their own wicked style of Ricochet Blues.