Young Johnny Cash’s life revealed on tour of Dyess
DYESS — Lyrics from two Johnny Cash classics posted at Historic Dyess Colony’s museum echo the hardscrabble childhood that the future musical maestro weathered during the Great Depression and World War II.
“Five Feet High and Rising” revisits a disastrous Delta flood: “The hives are gone, I’ve lost my bees. The chickens are sleepin’ in the willow trees. Cow’s in water up past her knees.”
In “Pickin’ Time,” the farmer father sings: “Every night when I go to bed, I thank the Lord that my kids are fed. They live on beans eight days and nine. But I get ’em fat come pickin’ time.”
Those lyrics help set a wistful tone for guided tours 2 miles west at the Johnny Cash Boyhood Home. The five-room house will be the setting this summer for two free “Live From the Cash Porch” concerts. Performing at 4:30 p.m. July 16 will be Brad Webb and Blind Mississippi Morris. Aug. 20 will bring Trout Fishing in America at the same time.
Exhibits at the Arkansas State University Heritage Site’s museum and visitor center offer engaging personal details about the 500 families who moved into the Dyess “resettlement colony” starting in 1934.
Each family received funds to buy 20 acres of land and a clapboard house with outbuildings. Ray Cash paid $2,183.60 in 1935 for his family’s homestead. The project, part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, aimed to give a fresh start to poor rural families. The money was eventually to be repaid to the federal government.
Johnny, known as “J.R.” in high school, arrived in Dyess at age 3 in
March 1935 with his parents and four siblings. A smaller museum room, showcasing items from Cash’s boyhood, displays some of the most captivating displays.
His Boy Scout card from Troop 34 shows that at age 12, he stood 5 feet, 2 inches tall and weighed 96 pounds. The page from his senior yearbook pictures him as class vice president. Each senior was given a saying, in his case: “Be a live wire, then you won’t get stepped on.”
Most poignant is a pillow that had belonged to older brother Jack, who was killed in a sawmill accident in 1944. As the exhibit explains, “After the death of his brother Jack, Johnny Cash treasured the pillow from Jack’s side of the bed that they shared as children.”
Visitors proceed from the museum for the guided home tour. The house looks comfortable enough, but would have been a tight fit for seven occupants. Johnny and three siblings slept in one bedroom, while a fifth child shared the other with parents. Dominating the bathroom is a castiron tub. There’s a sink, but no toilet. When Johnny was a boy, the house had no running water or electricity.
Most of the home’s furnishings are copies, based on the memories of Cash family members after his death in 2003. But the piano in the living room is the original instrument from the 1930s and ’40s. Johnny did not play the piano, which served as a family gathering spot.
In high school shop class, he built a waist-high cabinet with two drawers. A replica sits below the living-room mirror, while the original can be seen in the museum. It’s a neat piece of handiwork, suggesting that he might have been a decent carpenter if musical stardom hadn’t come along.