Johnny Cash's boyhood home set to open for tours

DYESS, Ark. Honkytonks and haute restaurants are equally hard to come by in this part of the Arkansas Delta these days, where places to see a show or legally buy a beer with dinner can be few and far between. Yet, music luminaries gather in the area annually to pay their respects to the memory and legend of Johnny Cash, who grew up in this tiny farm town in the northeast corner of the state. Tourists also occasionally make pilgrimages to honor the iconic entertainer, and now they finally have something to see.

Cashs boyhood home and the Dyess Administration Building have been restored in the first phase of a $5.59 million project that eventually aims to partly resurrect not only the historic Depression-era colony the Cash family called home, but this areas fiscal fortunes by drawing from 30,000 to 50,000 visitors annually. If those projections based on visitor numbers to the nearby boyhood homes of Elvis Presley and B.B. King are accurate, tourism could infuse as much as $10 million a year into the economy and add around 100 coveted jobs for the regions residents.

So, that, for Arkansas, is quite significant, said Ruth Hawkins, head of Arkansas State Universitys Heritage Sites program, which is guiding the restoration.

The Dyess projects grand opening is Aug. 16, the day after the university hosts the fourth annual Johnny Cash Music Festival, featuring headliners Reba McEntire, Bobby Bare and Loretta Lynn. The show started as a fundraiser for the project, which has also received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Arkansas Natural and Cultural Resources Council and other sources.

Officials at the university, based in Jonesboro, have so far cobbled together about $2.5 million. Eventually, they hope to resurrect the colonys theater building, which is now little more than a deteriorated shell, transforming it into a visitor orientation center, and build a caretaker home that replicates an original colony house. The later phases of the project emphasize the sites historical significance beyond its ties to the Man in Black.

The Dyess Colony was established as an agricultural resettlement community by the Works Progress Administration in 1934, as part of Roosevelts New Deal as a plan to get destitute farmers back on their feet, Hawkins said. And it wasnt a government handout. You came and you cultivated and worked the land. When the land became productive and you began to make some money off it, then you paid the government back with the idea of eventually owning your own land.

Five hundred families were selected to settle in modest houses there and, with the help of a mule and seed money, each tamed 20 to 40 acres of what was then forest and swampland. To qualify, colonists had to have a proven record as successful farmers before the Depression. Ray and Carrie Cash and their five oldest children were among those chosen to take part in the cultural experiment, so the family including a 3-year-old then called J.R. moved to Dyess from Kingsland, Ark., in 1935.

I think that was an important part of American history the New Deal and the WPA project. Maybe its still fairly recent enough that we dont look at it as the important part of history that it is. But for really desperately poor families like the Cash family was; it saved them, said Cashs oldest daughter, the performer and writer Rosanne Cash. I dont think they would have survived without the WPA project. And that town was created purely out of that. There were 500 cottages, the administration building where my grandpa sold the cotton he picked and the co-op, the movie theater, the caf and the school. It was a fully functioning town, and theres not much left of it now.

Considering its former state of disrepair, it is fortunate from a cultural perspective that the Cash house was one of the few original buildings still standing. While it was valued at $100,000 when the university acquired it in 2011, that appraisal was due more to its historical significance than its structural soundness.

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Johnny Cash's boyhood home set to open for tours