When Jenna was just three years old, her mother drove out of her life without a backward glance, leaving Jenna in the care of her grandmother and her two aunts. Jenna has grown up in the company of these three women in a rural area in the mountains east of Humboldt County, California. Her grandmother, known to everyone as Billy, has managed to keep her family together through many hard times. She is a strong matriarch, unwilling to compromise, and always in charge of what goes on in her home-no one ever contradicts her. Jenna's Aunt Louise suffers from a rare genetic disorder. She is loving and kind and anything but boring. She needs close supervision, especially when she is in the kitchen: she can't be trusted with knives or anything hot. Aunt Marge is the closest thing to a mother Jenna has had all of these years. Jenna's main job when she was not in school has been to assist her Aunt Marge-an unlicensed, mostly self-taught veterinary assistant-on her rounds tending to sick animals on the local ranches. Jenna values this part of her life more than anything else. In the summer of 1985, Jenna is seventeen years old and newly graduated from high school. She is to be the first of her family to attend college and will be leaving for the University of California at Berkeley in the fall. But she doesn't want to go. All she wants is to stay where she is and take over the care of the local animals when Aunt Marge no longer can. Making her life even more unsettled, Jenna receives a letter from her mother. To Jenna, both her mother and father might as well be dead. Her father went missing in Vietnam shortly after Jenna was born, and until this letter arrived, Jenna had not heard from her mother in almost fifteen years. Jenna has no idea if she wants to have any sort of relationship with the woman who abandoned her. While the Music Played is a compelling story about family and forgiveness. It is Jenna's story. It is also the story of her mother and her father and how the choices they made affected their family.