Set in the first two decades of the twentieth century, mainly around Bristol, Virginia (which is partly in Tennessee), the novel focuses on Hannah Ruth Bayless, an untutored Appalachian singer with a beautiful voice; her handsome, thieving, backwoods husband, Dudley Crider; their child singer Joe, who is born blind and inherits his mother's gift, and Pink Miracle, a fiddler from who falls in love with and later marries Hannah Ruth, taking her away from Bristol, her family and forming a musical partnership.