Owensboro: Where Mutton Smoke Meets Bluegrass

You are rolling into Owensboro, and the first thing you need to know is that this city claims two things almost no other place on earth can: it is the undisputed capital of smoked mutton barbecue, and it is ground zero for American bluegrass music.

The town began in seventeen ninety-seven when William Smeathers built a cabin on the south bank of the Ohio River at a place locals called Yellow Banks, named for the color of the river clay. When the Kentucky legislature formalized it as a city in eighteen seventeen, they renamed it Owensborough, honoring Colonel Abraham Owen of Shelby County, a Kentucky militia officer who had been killed at the Battle of Tippecanoe six years earlier. The spelling would not become the modern Owensboro until eighteen ninety-three.

The barbecue tradition here is deeply agricultural. By eighteen sixty, Daviess County farmers kept nearly eleven thousand sheep compared to fewer than seven thousand beef cattle. When a celebration called for slow cooking over wood, it was mutton, not beef, that went into the pit. Catholic parish picnics throughout the eighteen hundreds kept the flame alive, and the tradition of hickory-smoked mutton with a black Worcestershire-based dipping sauce became something completely its own. Today the annual BBQ and Barrels Festival draws tens of thousands of visitors who consume more than ten tons of mutton and fifteen hundred gallons of burgoo, a hearty stew that dates to Welsh settlers in the region.

On the musical side, you do not have to go far to find the cradle of bluegrass. The community of Rosine, just southeast of here in Ohio County, is where Bill Monroe was born in nineteen eleven and learned his first gospel harmonies as a child at the local Methodist church. Monroe went on to assemble the first true bluegrass band in the nineteen thirties. The International Bluegrass Music Association established its first headquarters in Owensboro in nineteen eighty-five, and the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame and Museum has called this city home since nineteen ninety-one. The music and the smoke, it turns out, have been rising from the same Kentucky river soil for nearly two centuries.