Johnny Cash first house where he grew up opens to viewings
Guitar and singing Country music legend Johnny Cash’s boyhood house is being opened up to the public to help the Arkansas town where he grew up. Cash moved to the house in Dyess in 1935, when he was just 3, as part of a government drive to help families after the Great Depression. The five-room wooden home has been refurbished and features the family’s piano as well as other period items. See the video of Johnny revisiting the house at the bottom of this article.
The star’s siblings Tommy and Joanne have overseen the refurbishment. “We’ve got everything just as it was,” Joanne Cash, now 76, told the New York Times. “It took a lot of hard work. It’s been very emotional for me.” The most meaningful item, she said, was the piano. “We used to gather around that piano at night and sing gospel for an hour. That was our entertainment.” Cash made his name with songs like I Walk the Line, Ring of Fire and Folsom Prison Blues
The Cashes were among 500 families who moved to the new settlement under President Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal. They were all given good terms on their 20-acre plots, which came with a house, a barn and a mule. The Cash family grew cotton, among other crops, and the young Johnny was working full-time in the fields by the age of 10. “From the time I started chopping cotton at 10, I always knew that I was going to be a singer on the radio,” he said.
Cash began his recording career five years later and went on to become one of the giants of American popular music. He died in 2003. The refurbishment of the family home is at the heart of an attempt to boost the fortunes of Dyess, which has struggled since its heyday in the late 1930s.
Mayor Larry Sims said he hoped it would attract 20,000 visitors a year. The colony administration centre has also been restored and turned into a museum, while there are plans to rebuild the town theatre, other buildings on the Cash family land and a neighbour’s house. Cash’s daughter Rosanne told the Associated Press that without this scheme, led by Arkansas State University (ASU), Dyess might be at risk of going to ruin.
“We have lost many other such places of historic significance because of a lack of funds, disinterest or ignorance,” she said. “I am so happy ASU stepped in when they did. There were only around 35 cottages left and my dad’s, though dilapidated, was one of those.” There is also an existing Johnny Cash Museum in Nashville, Tennessee.
See the video of Johnny Cash visiting his boyhood home in Dyess Arkansas with wife June Carter Cash and his sister Louise. The Cash family sold the house in 1954 and 15 years later this video was recorded. “We moved into this house in the winter of 1935. There were five cans of paint sitting there on the floor, was all it was here. Remember? And every one of us sat down in the middle of the floor and cried.” says Johnny Cash in this very touching video.
http://youtu.be/fZ14Nx3W7Hk