With the Dust Bowl years steeped in recent memory, a blues loving black boy named Garth Washington comes of age in the sharecropper's community of Ricochet Louisiana with his guitar and harmonica playing best friend Ben Henry Johansson.
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.