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Susan Tedeschi knows family bands. For fourteen years she and her husband, slide guitar virtuoso Derek Trucks, have led the Tedeschi Trucks Band, the Grammy-winning groove-and-blues collective the two formed in 2010, after nearly a decade of sharing bills with their individual bands. Many of those shows also featured Derek’s other group, the Allman Brothers Band, which he’d been playing with since the mid-nineties—and which his uncle, drummer Butch Trucks, had cofounded himself.But even before meeting Derek, Susan knew the family way was best; after her initial appearance at Farm Aid in 1999, she got tight with Willie and his wife Annie. He took Susan under his wing, giving her and her band spots on his tours, where she saw firsthand the musical and emotional…

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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.

A frequent frustration of mine, as a listener who grew up on the pretty boy pop stylings of Enrique Iglesias and Ricky Martin and came of age in the golden era of reggaeton, is the degree to which today’s algorithmic streaming services struggle to parse “Latin” music. Ask Spotify for a radio station based on, say, a hip-hop group from Nuevo Léon, and you might well wind up being served a jarring mix of sultry Cuban boleros, folk vocals from Veracruz, and the latest Bad Bunny banger. It seems, sometimes, as though the robots have been trained to believe that every track in Spanish is of the same ilk.Nowhere does the algo suffer more of late, though, then when attempting to untangle regional Mexican music,…

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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.

WHO: Lila Smethurst, a seventh grader at Tex Hill Middle School, in San Antonio.WHAT: Food Network’s Kids Baking Championship, a baking-competition TV show in which young bakers, aged eight to thirteen this season, vie to win $25,000 and a feature in Food Network Magazine.WHY IT’S SO GREAT: Smethurst took home the top prize in the elimination-style reality show that challenges young kitchen whizzes to create everything from cupcakes to pastries, all while testing their skills, creativity, and ability to work under pressure.During the season finale of Food Network’s Kids Baking Championship, competitors were tasked with making science fair–style volcano cakes that had to produce smoke. Texan Lila Smethurst created a polar-themed volcano cake that won the judges over.Even though she’s young, the Tex Hill Middle…

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Tucked into a far corner of San Angelo, Western Sky Steakhouse sits unassumingly between a bright orange taqueria and the Sands Motel. I’ve been coming here for as long as I can remember, and its steaks are the only ones I’ll eat when I visit home (aside from my dad’s, of course). It’s so intertwined with my life that at one point last year, a billboard with my cousin’s smiling face advertising a local pediatric clinic rose above the parking lot. With its metal roof, beige exterior, and dirt lot, Western Sky doesn’t look like much, but it might as well be Ruth’s Chris to the cowboys who come through town every rodeo season. When the ropers and riders visit for the stock show and rodeo…

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The fish are always biting in Baffin Bay, a one-hundred-square-mile body of water that cuts in toward the South Texas Plains about two hours south of Corpus Christi. The bay is home to redfish and speckled trout, prized sport fish that beckon anglers nationwide. It’s also known as a great spot to catch black drum. Roughly half of all black drum caught in the Upper Laguna Madre, the vast saltwater lagoon that separates the mainland from Padre Island, comes from Baffin. This abundance would appear to be at odds with the bay’s extreme salinity: salt levels here can rise to one hundred parts per thousand, three times that of the Gulf of Mexico. But this is no Dead Sea. For more than a century, Texans…

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