A Black American songwriter dies and goes to Hell, where he causes more trouble for the Devil than initially expected.

Going under the name "Black Elvis," a performer meets a another vocalist and faces an identity crisis.

Going under the name "Black Elvis," a performer meets a another vocalist and faces an identity crisis.

An African American man in his early-20s becomes renowned for his blues performances on the streets around the United States, playing for jail inmates, young couples, and passerbys alike.

When a melancholic blues singer gets his big break, he discovers that his success as a musician is mutually exclusive with his happiness as a human being.

At a Blues Festival, a fourteen-year-old boy talks to his father for the first time but does not reveal who he is.

In a segregated America at the onset of World War II, strange, explosive “stumps”—formed out of spores and resembling wooden statues of the recently deceased—have begun to appear all over cities. To neutralize and remove these stumps, a new government agency has employed a group of singers whose unique vocal resonance can turn the stumps to dust. But when the only two Black female “exterminators” in Chicago—a God-fearing goody two-shoes and a brash blues singer—uncover the agency's corrupt secrets, they decide to stage a rebellion.

In the far future, a woman is selected to undergo a Great Becoming. As she is forced to choose what she will become, she realizes that someone people do not have to choose at all.

A Black singer moves her community through the power of song throughout the tumultuous 20th century as she sings everything from blues to gospel music.