"At the edge of the woods the girl hesitated, then darted forward like a deer. Stopping in front of the house, she dug into the pocket of her dress and placed something on the bottom step. Then turned at once and ran, disappearing quickly into the pines."

To Rainy Barnes, it is a mystery where this girl and her presents come from--a silver medallion on a chain, a bracelet with a flat green stone, a bright gold ring. But the bigger mystery to Rainy is her own existence: as an infant she was found by Papa Will in the crook of a tree, wrapped in a big soft blanket, with raindrops on her cheeks.

River Music is told in a symphony of voices, the voices of people, black and white, whose lives are intertwined in the unsettled, unsettling years following the Civil War. Throughout, the cadences of life in the rural South lure the reader to piece together Rainy's story and the stories of those around her.