Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

Taylor Day Grace wasn’t quite sure how her now husband Charley Crockett felt about her the first time they hung out. At the White Horse honky-tonk in East Austin, it wasn’t until they rounded “probably hour five” of what would become a fourteen-hour-long conversation that she started to have a feeling. “I was like, ‘Oh, I think he might like me,’ ” she said.  Grace, who works as a musician and stylist, describes her first impression of country singer and songwriter Crockett as “not hide-in-a-corner shy but just a little bit shy” and having a “sweet heart and a deep soul.” The pair previously crossed paths at Austin’s storied blues club Antone’s, in 2018, but all that really came of it was Grace’s asking Crockett if he…

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

I’m sitting in the back seat of a midnight blue Lincoln Continental convertible that looks almost identical to the one that carried John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Two U.S. flags on the hood flutter in the wind as we cruise through downtown Dallas. This meticulously restored 1963 model even features blankets emblazoned with the presidential seal. As we turn left onto Elm Street from Houston Street, my guide, Robin Brown, slows to 14 miles per hour, close to the speed Kennedy’s motorcade traveled along this route. More than sixty years have passed since the assassination, but I still find myself holding my breath as we roll over the first hand-painted X on the pavement marking where the initial shot struck. By the second X,…

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

Texans You Should Know is a series highlighting overlooked figures and events from Texas history. Some forty miles east of Houston, past the confluence of the Old and Lost rivers, Texas begins to lose its grip on the horizon. By the time you reach the visitor center at the Big Thicket National Preserve, in Kountze, dense forests of loblolly pine, beech, magnolia, sweetgum, and cypress occlude any clear view. Eddying among those trees are turbid bayous and baygalls, dark as coffee, that provide a funhouse reflection of the overstory—a biodome of fronds, needles, bark, and algae punctuated by the calls of things wild and unseen. A greater diversity of plant and animal life thrives here than in anywhere else in Texas. The preserve is home to…

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This past July, cardiac surgeon O. H. “Bud” Frazier helped achieve the near culmination of his life’s work: the implantation in a patient’s chest of an artificial heart that, theoretically, will last decades. Now 84, Frazier, the codirector of the Center for Preclinical Surgical & Interventional Research at Houston’s Texas Heart Institute, has performed more than 1,200 transplant operations in his long career. Yet he came to believe such procedures were inadequate; they bought many patients years, not decades, of life. Frazier concluded, to the derision of many of his colleagues, that an artificial heart could be a better alternative. Just as air travel wasn’t possible until inventors stopped trying to imitate birds in flight, Frazier thought researchers could create a permanent artificial heart only when they…

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

Billy Bob Thornton shrugs when I ask why exactly he plays so many Texans. Wearing that perennially you-know-what-eating grin, he takes a drag on his American Spirit. “If you’re from the South, you must be from Texas, right?” he says, imitating clueless film executives.That doesn’t quite explain it, because he’s got the locals fooled too. “Billy Bob’s Texan, ain’t he?” one good ol’ boy asked into the crowd of good ol’ boys and girls. We’re packed into Main Street Crossing, in Tomball, thirty miles northwest of downtown Houston, to hear Thornton sing with his rock band, the Boxmasters. The pearl-snapped fan took Thornton’s Texanness almost on faith, mentioned in between telling tales of decades spent riding bulls and of seeing George Strait before he was…

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