"Country Music" consists of 24 stories, three of them novelette length, depicting rural life in America during the Great Depression and Army life during the Korean War of the 1950s. The stories are linked through setting and characters to produce the effect of two episodic novels-one concerning the basic training, combat experience and readjustment to civilian life of a group of Army draftees, the other a dissection of "small townism" during the stressful 1930s. Many of the stories are written in a colloquial and dialectal style, from the viewpoint of the characters.