Lionel Worthing is a music prodigy from a poor Kentucky farming family, he who is able to visualize sound. Despite being orphaned at a point in his growing up, David Smith has a more privileged background under the guardianship of an uncle in Newport. Both students at a music conservatory in New England, they meet for the first time in 1917 at a bar. It is their shared love of folk music that initially brings them together, that bond eventually romantic and sexual. While the Great War separates them, they are brought together postwar when David, who works as a researcher at an Augusta, ME college, asks Lionel, who has been back at the family farm for the intervening years, to accompany him on a several month project to collect folk songs through rural New England. The question becomes what will happen with their relationship after the conclusion of the project with they only knowing what each has chose to divulge to the other in their so far limited time together regarding the other's hopes and dreams. Despite both arguably believing working on this project the happiest each has ever been, Lionel does muse about a traditional family life with a wife and children, while David has his own more hidden issues outside of their time together.