Barbara Brannon

It took Lubbock, Texas, a while to appreciate the merit of that hometown kid with the flashy Fender and the hitch in his vocal technique. By now, though, the cult of Buddy Holly has pervaded the city sufficiently to reward any…

On the rugged verge of the caprock in Briscoe County, visitors will find some of the most dramatic highway vistas in Texas (especially along TX 86 and TX 207). And in the lush, creek-drained valley below the cliffs roams the…

Long before there was a city called El Paso, or even a transnational border, there was a river. The Navajos and the Apaches and even the British had their own names for it, but the Spanish explorers who rode up toward…

Sometimes the best guide to our shared history is a poet. Carmen Tafolla was born and raised in the West Side barrios of San Antonio, among what she terms “the forgotten people,” and has devoted herself — in her writing…

Scurry County preservationist Paula Hatfield’s family roots are in East Texas, but since moving to the Snyder area in 1997, she’s devoted immense energy, enthusiasm and creativity to saving the heritage of her adopted West Texas. The daughter of an…

Pull up a chair in the warm-toned dining room, peer out through the tall, wood-trimmed mission-style windows and watch the long freight train rumble past, and you’d almost swear it was 1912 once more, with your china plate of pork…

“Our colonists and Villagers, having no whisky on which to wast[e] time and taxation,” read the first issue of the Clarendon News on June 1, 1878, “will have no trouble in keeping closely up with every public improvement necessary.” The…

Every summer morning before sunup, Dr. Vijay Reddy drives 45 minutes from his Lubbock home out to the Terry County acres he’s cultivated for four decades. It was the rich farming soils of the Llano Estacado that brought him here…