Ten-year-old Bud Caldwell is on the lam.

Running from the barren, impersonal confines of a 1930s orphanage and a stupidly cruel and dysfunctional foster home, he is off on a search for his birth father.

All Bud has in the world he carries in a battered suitcase which he guards with his life. There is a picture of his mother, some stones she treasured, a blanket, and the only clue to his father, a blue flyer advertising Herman E. Calloway and the Dusky Devastators of the Depression, a jazz band working out of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Bud's journey is sometimes a matter of two steps forward and three steps back, but with the help of some new friends who pop up along the way, he finally arrives at Grand Calloway Station, home of the man he knows must be his father. What Bud finds there is not what he expected; in some ways, it is even better.