Black Tuesday's Child

Born on the first day of the Great Depression, Randy Davies absorbs the values of small-town Texas life in a time and place when the willingness to do hard and unpleasant work is a measure of a man's worth. Later, those values fight for dominance when he is tempted to pursue a chancy life as an opera and concert singer and to marry a delightful but childlike girl whom he meets while studying voice in Bavaria. Another aspect of his inner conflict is his guilty love of the Rocky Mountains as compared to the flat and dutiful plains of the Texas Panhandle--a conflict that is heightened for him by memories of a night during his childhood when a neighbor showed his own love for the mountains by committing a murder. Black Tuesday's Child, being about Randy's struggles with his impulses, is also about music, the land, the changing times, and the love of two remarkable young women.