Mixing family recollections with happenings on the larger screen of American events, journalist and author Bryan Mealer (MUCK CITY, ALL THINGS MUST FIGHT TO LIVE) has created a saga of constantly changing proportions.

The author’s great-grandfather was one of the first of his line to embrace the unknown, leaving the Appalachian region of Georgia with his wife and children in 1892 when moonshining got too dangerous. His destination was Texas. He eventually wound up in the town of Big Spring, where the oil boom would shape his family’s fate, with the promise of getting rich quick or losing everything. Coloring the background are the Great Depression, droughts, dust storms, two wars and a tough strain of Christian fundamentalism, presaged in an early scene when evangelist Billy Sunday comes to Texas and bathes himself, literally, in the black gold.

"[Mealer] paints a vivid portrait of Big Spring and the alterations to the town and its overarching ethos in the years his family dwelt there."

Mealer has provided two family trees for general reference, but with the usual branching of such trees, there are many extra characters to follow in this multigenerational tale. Memorable moments abound, so keeping track of names and relationships is secondary to absorption of powerful images. When Mealer’s great-grandmother died, her body was laid in a cheap box on a table, “and underneath the table lay my grandfather and his sister Velva, curled up on the floor and crying for their mother.” There were times when the family nearly froze, and many instances when there was nothing to eat.

Frances Mealer recounts being wrested by a kindly preacher from the clutches of her grief-maddened mother, whose beloved husband had perished from “double-dust pneumonia.” For the first time, in foster care, Frances had regular meals and decent clothes. An early forebear was swindled out of his land by oil speculators; another made a living selling dirt after destructive drought and dust storms had misplaced this precious commodity, suddenly needed for new construction during yet another oil boom. Whole families slept on floors or rode the rods, chasing employment hopes or fleeing from the latest catastrophe, and a few just disappeared without a trace. In a poignant last scene, the author and his family gather around the bedside of their seemingly indomitable grandmother Opal and honor her last request, to “sing her home.”

The mix of micro- and macrocosm sometimes makes for a difficult juggling act, but Mealer is fit for the task. He relies on the reader to know a bit about the larger historical staging ground for his chronicle, and deftly fills in some shading in time and place when necessary. He paints a vivid portrait of Big Spring and the alterations to the town and its overarching ethos in the years his family dwelt there. He found a gem in Frances, whose association with swing musician Bob Wills forms a neat sidebar to the folksy family story and whose memorabilia and sharp recollections provide some of the book’s most evocative moments.