W.C. Handy Blues & Barbecue Festival (handyblues.org) has become one of the largest FREE music festivals in the nation and is held every summer the week before Fathers Day in beautiful Audubon Mill Park.
The festival is a celebration of the life and legacy of Henderson resident and “Father of the Blues,” William Christopher Handy. According to legend, the Alabama born composer and his band were traveling home from the postponed Chicago World’s Fair in 1892 when they ran out of money in St. Louis. Work was scarce there, so Handy left the rest of the band and headed to Evansville, Indiana.
In need of funds, Handy worked on a street paving crew and joined a local band that performed throughout the region. While the group played at a Henderson barbecue, he met Elizabeth Price, who soon became his wife.
Handy spent nearly a decade in Henderson before moving on, eventually to be recognized as an accomplished composer of the blues and spiritual music. In his autobiography Father of the Blues, Handy said: “I didn’t write any songs in Henderson, but it was there I realized that experiences I had had, things I had seen and heard could be set down in a kind of music characteristic of my race. There I learned to appreciate the music of my people…then the blues were born, because from that day on, I started thinking about putting my own experience down in that particular kind of music.”