Part One

Boyle prefaces "Stones in My Passway, Hellhound on My Trail" with an excerpt from a song titled "Stones in My Passway" by blues composer and singer Robert Johnson. The story opens with the main character, identified only as "Robert," playing blues at the House Party Club in Dallas on a Saturday night. "His voice rides up to a reedy falsetto that gets the men hooting and then down to the cavernous growl that chills the women." The club, "dingy and brown" with cigarette smoke, is full of working class black men and women, drinking and dancing the evening away. The men concentrate on Robert's intricate picking while the women "look into his eyes." It is 1938, moving toward the end of the depression and the beginning of World War II, but Robert seems oblivious to anything but his music. He has not eaten in two days.

The...