Henderson: Where Audubon Found His Calling and the Blues Found Its Voice

Henderson, Kentucky sits on a bluff above the Ohio River, a small city with an outsized claim on American cultural history. Two men who passed through here, separated by nearly a century, each discovered who they were meant to be on these wooded riverbanks.

The first was John James Audubon. He arrived in Henderson in eighteen ten when it was still a raw frontier village, drawn by the dense forest lining the Ohio and the extraordinary variety of birds that lived within it. Audubon and his wife Lucy settled here, and he tried his hand at business. He ran a store. He invested in a mill. In eighteen sixteen, he partnered with Lucy's brother Thomas Bakewell to build a flour mill on the riverfront, sinking roughly fifteen thousand dollars into the venture. The mill was plagued from the start: construction delays, cost overruns, equipment breakdowns, and most fatally, a misjudgment of how much lumber and wheat the region could actually supply. Three years after opening, Audubon could not pay his creditors. He was briefly imprisoned for debt, then declared bankruptcy in eighteen nineteen. The failure left the family destitute, and it drove them out of Henderson.

But the nine years Audubon spent wandering these woods produced something the mill never could. While the business was failing, he was filling folio after folio with meticulous, vivid paintings of birds observed in their natural habitat, many of them drawn from the forests right here. The resulting work, Birds of America, contained four hundred thirty-five engravings depicting one thousand sixty-five birds, rendered at life size. It remains one of the most celebrated illustrated books ever produced.

A century later, a young musician named William Christopher Handy was hired to play for a Henderson social engagement. In his autobiography he described the moment as his turning point, writing that in Henderson he changed from a drifter to a professional musician. He told an interviewer that though he wrote no songs here, it was in Henderson that he recognized the experiences of his people could be shaped into a distinctive music. That music became the blues. Handy went on to publish Memphis Blues in nineteen twelve, the first commercially published blues song, and history remembered him as the Father of the Blues.

Audubon's mill site still stands along the riverfront. The state park bearing his name preserves the museum and the landscape that made him. Henderson is a quiet place today, but two American art forms, the natural history illustration and the blues, owe a debt to its river and its trees.