Hebblethwaite builds a history of Haitian Vodou running from West Africa to Saint-Domingue to the recording studios of contemporary Haiti, drawing on four centuries of political, social and religious history alongside fieldwork and language documentation.

The book comes in two halves. The African chapters look at Dahomey, Allada and Hueda, taking in economics and culture as well as politics, and attend closely to how Europeans stoked local tensions. The Haitian chapters follow two rites to their sources: the Rada Rite, traced to Allada, and the Gede Rite, traced to Abomey. Both are approached through song, specifically the tracks on two rasin compact discs, Rasin Figuier's Vodou Lakay and Rasin Bwa Kayiman's Guede, issued by Jean Altidor on the Miami label Mass Konpa Records.

Every song on the two discs is read through a procedure Hebblethwaite names Vodou hermeneutics, which pulls together history, religious studies, linguistics, literary criticism and ethnomusicology to put the study of Vodou songs on scholarly footing.